Failures in user initiated jobs (like checkout, stage, audit, promote, ...) may be caused by special (or missing) values for so called &V0x variables and/or user options. Typical failures are:
invalid (or simply missing) values for DSN=... in a staging job.
entire jobsteps that are missing (because of some skeleton variable that has an unexpected value, or just no value at all).
Periodically, typically at the beginning of business hours, you should do an (automatic) verification that all your started tasks are "up", and this across all Z/OS images where at least 1 ChangeMan ZMF STC runs.
A variation of this is verifying that each of these STCs have been started with the correct options (to avoid other problems such at package installation time), to mention a few:
The jobname of the STC.
The type of ChangeMan ZMF subsystem (D-, P-, DP- or ALL-site).
The name of the (remote) site that the STC corresponds to.
Staging libraries are the data sets related to a change package in which ChangeMan ZMF stores its changed components. Together with the meta data of the package and the components in it (both stored in ChangeMan ZMF control files like CMNPMAST), they actually constitute the change package. And the ChangeMan ZMF started task (server running on the mainframe) will take care of managing all such staging libraries: they get created (by ChangeMan ZMF) whenever they are needed, and they get removed during housekeeping, after the package became INS/BAS.
Here are some issues about these staging libraries:
Anybody knows this issue, which is about all non-BAS packages that have a planned installed date that's somewhere in the past. It's entered on the last panel to create a package, or updated via the U7 panel.
A possible solution to eliminate these difficulties is to add restart instructions in all appropriate Xnode members, so that these instructions are available in any job listing of any Xnode job that may have to be restarted.
In case of a failed installation of a change package, the failing job (typically the CMN10, CMN20, CMN21 or CMN30 job) needs to be restarted, after the reason for the failure has been addressed. Such restart typically needs to be initiated by operations control people (and quite a lot during non-business hours). To actually perform such restart, these people often encounter quite some difficulties that need to be addressed somehow:
According to the ChangeMan ZMF manuals you should always shutdown the started task with the modify command to “orderly shutdown”, which then also ensures the correct closing of the VSAM files.
However, there are a few occasions where this simply does not happen, like: