International Business Machines Corporation

Daniel J Byers

Donald Eugene Denning

A system is provided for monitoring signals transmitted over one or more optical serial interface channels in an ESCON environment. A formatter card mounts on bus connector in a general purpose tracing tool (GPT) and intercepts optical I/O signals being transmitted between a host processor and, a peripheral device. The signals are decoded into trace data words which are then partitioned into ESCON transaction frames and mapped into a block of GPT frames. The GPT block is stored on the formatter card and transmitted to the GPT when the GPT can accept the data. Data received by the GPT is interleaved with data from other formatter cards attached to other I/O channels (both ESCON and non-ESCON) and is displayed or printed in time-correlated format for analysis. Data can also be stored for later review.

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Tucson, AZ, United States of America

Daniel J Byers