If, for whatever reason, the MAREN catalog is not available, so-called offline logging may be activated. This means that processing does continue without the MAREN catalog, but logging records are still written. A prerequisite for this is that the control task MARENCP continues to run. Once the error has been recovered, a current MAREN catalog can be generated using the UPDATE-MAREN-CATALOG statement. However, this emergency mode has the drawback that data security is no longer guaranteed since MAREN can perform no further checks.
Furthermore, devices assigned to a storage location by means of the ADD-DEVICE-DEPOT command can no longer be used.
Offline logging is activated by starting a MARENCP ENTER file without the link name MARENCAT (see section “Execution of MARENCP”). The MARENADM administrator program can only be used in interactive mode with severe restrictions (only the STOP-CONTROL-PROGRAM statement) and in batch mode, the program cannot be used at all.