Before going all-in on cybersecurity, I spent the first 10 years of my career as a z/OS operator. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into in the beginning, but mainframes sounded exciting and I knew there weren’t a lot of places I could get access to such hardware.
I could go on for hours about how the mainframe platform is really exciting and unique, and about how anyone calling it a legacy platform has absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
But instead I just want to show off what I finally got running in my homelab – z/OS 3.1 ! Which is almost the newest version as of writing, and what a lot of companies are running right now.
Emulating a mainframe is pretty straightforward with opensource projects like the Hercules Emulator, and there are a lot of older turnkey ‘machines’ available for download running the old MVS 3.8 which is considered to be in the public domain now. There is even a somewhat sketchy z/OS 1.10 floating around on torrent sites, if one is so inclined.
My mainframe is running on IBM’s own zPDT and of course running an untouched version of z/OS, making it perfect for tinkering and experimenting. It’s been years since I’ve sat at a Master Console, but it’s slowly coming back, like riding a bicycle. It’s a whole new experience, since I don’t have to worry about breaking anything and accidentally costing someone millions.
If you want to know more about ‘The Forgotten Fortress’ and z/OS security I highly recommend watching some of the amazing talks Phil Young has made through the years. I have had the pleasure of attending The Evil Mainframe Course, which he taught along with Chad Rikansrud years ago.
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