Virtual tape success!
I've been trying for a few days, to find a good way to get real looking data records into a MVS dataset from a local Linux file. It's been fairly tedious and unproductive. So this success was a big morale boost to me. For me this was a major hurdle.
Finally successfully loaded 1000, 141 byte customer records onto Hercules/MVS. As I previously said (see 10/06 ) I used Jay Moseley's "maketape" program to create an AWSTAPE. I then used IEBGENER to load that virtual tape to a MVS dataset. I've been having a few days of JCL and MVS operator console problems. So I've been reading about JCL and realized the VOLSER was always described as being 6 characters, I had assumed up to 6 max. So I finally changed the VOL1 label from 'VOL1' to 'VOL001' and it worked! I looked up console messages but don't remember seeing anything specifically about that.
You can see the 142 byte customer record below on Linux. And below that you can see the same records in a TSO 3270 screen in MVS. The 3270 screen needed to be shifted to see all 142 bytes. Click the images to enlarge.
Customer records on Linux
Customer records on MVS (3270 screen right side)
Customer records on MVS (3270 screen left side)
I may try a much larger file, maybe a million records if I get brave and have the DASD space.