New TSO user user catalog assignment problem

[Charles Durrett]

Hello.   The Hercules and Tur(n)key packages are impressive pieces of work.   I had some mainframe experience some 20 years ago and what I've been playing with the last couple of weeks compares very favorably with that experience in terms of speed and capabilities.

Twenty years ago they wouldn't let me anywhere near a system console and now I have two!  And with freedom comes responsibility which leads up to my question.

It seems to be best practice and sensible to have a user catalog for TSO users so the master catalog doesn't get 'polluted' with questionable and numerous user entried.   The Tur(n)key system comes with four HERC0# TSO users defined and they have IDCAMS aliases pointing to SYS1.UCAT.TSO .   Ah, the TSO user catalog I figure.

The documentation which I can find with and about Tur(n)key covers creating a TSO user without mention of linking the user ID to a user catalog.   Other documentation talks about assigning the user id as an alias to a user catalog.

I've had no problem creating new TSO users and no apparent problem with the IDCAMS alias assignment of the new user id to SYS1.UCAT.TSO .

The problem I do have is that my new TSO user doesn't appear able to use the alias for a user catalog.  I am unable to create datasets and have them cataloged.  The RPF allocate datasets panel gets and error saying "ALIAS CHAR01   NOTFND".  CHAR01 is the newly created TSO user id.

I feel I'm overlooking something which seems to be blazingly obvious to everyone else as I've found no one talking about this same sort of problem.

Any idea where I should be looking to figure this out?

[Charles Durrett]

I finally figured out how to get it working.   Put the IKJEFT01 and IDCAMS jobsteps together in one JCL and just ran it in batch.

Don't know what the problem was with running them separately.  Only two differences I could see was that now I have a UNIT(3350) for the TSO user and I paid particularily close attention to the operator console so I could reply the master catalog password when needed.

Sorry to bother ya'll with a nooby fault.