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Please! Verify all details or suggestions with the appropriate vendor and / or vendor's manuals.

Enhanced Catalog Sharing

We have successfully activated ECS with OW39071 and OW42883 (PTFs UW66488 and UW67756 for OS/390 2.7) applied on our Test - Sysplex, Red Book SG24-5594-00 (Enhanced Catalog Sharing and Management) was very helpful.
Franz Breyner (IBM-Main)

Any ideas on why 3.4 would require alter to the catalog?

Master Catalog ALTER Attempts

Because 3.4 accesses the catalog in a way that could expose sensitive information (e.g. passwords) that might exist in the catalog. Therefore, Catalog Management checks for ALTER to the catalog, as that is one of the privileges that lets you see passwords. In general, you should not use WARNING on catalogs, as it will just cause confusion.

Walt Farrell, SecureWay Security Server for z/OS Design, IBM
IBM Mainframe Discussion List

The Master Catalog

A master catalog is the same structually, as a user catalog. For ease of backup and recovery no user datasets should be cataloged in the master catalog. The system datasets used for initialization must be in the master cat.

To provide faster response to concurrent requests for catalog entries, your master catalog should primarily contain user catalog entries. User catalogs contain entries for most data sets, indexes, and volumes.

How the system finds the Master Catalog

There are two sources:
member LOADxx's SYSCAT, or SYS1.NUCLEUS(SYSCATLG)

The LOADxx member is found in the SYSn.IPLPARM or in SYS1.PARMLIB
more about these data sets in the PARMLIB section.

SYSCATLG of SYS1.NUCLEUS will be used if the SYSCAT parameter is not included in the LOADxx member of SYS1.IPLPARM.

The system will ask for a suffix xx to be appended to SYSCAT to form a member name in SYS1.NUCLEUS, if there's no SYSCAT statement in LOADxx, or IMSI was specified A, C, D, or P (ignore LOADxx's SYSCAT).

If "Enter" is pressed, then the system will pick SYSCATLG. Or you can specify a different suffix. Probably, something unpleasant will happen if you press "Enter", if there's no SYSCATLG there.

Sample JCL to password protect the Master Catalog

Alternate Master Catalog

Because the Master catalog is vital to the functioning of a MVS data center, an alternate master catalog should be created, the alternate catalog can be used to do an IPL, at minimum an IPL can be done, the original catalog can be repaired or recovered.

Use REPRO command to copy the master catalog into a newly defined catalog, the newly defined catalog should then be used as the primary catalog, and the old master should be used as the alternate

Updates have to be manually added to the alternate catalog.

An Alternate LOADxx member will be required

User Catalogs

The user catalogs are pointed to by the Master Catalog

There can be a various amount of user catalogs depending on the installation procedures of your data center.

VLF

LLA provides better performance when VLF services are available, so it is better (although not necessary) to start VLF before LLA. However, the operation of LLA does not depend on VLF.

Determining Catalogs in VLF:
F CATALOG,REPORT,CACHE

Removing Catalogs from VLF:
F CATALOG,NOVLF(your.catname)
Please don't forget to fix your changes in SYS1.PARMLIB(COFVLFxx)

Parmlib member COFVLFxx (Virtual Lookaside Facility Parameters)

The Virtual Lookaside Facility for OS/390 2.10