IBM has posted a Red Alert Notification to its customers regarding a defect that was introduced in the underlying z/OS service in release 1.10 which continues to apply to all current levels of z/OS. APAR OA48941 contains the details of the problem and notifies customers that if corrective service isn’t applied prior to December 15th, 2015, users of z/OS Unicode Conversion Services may encounter problems while using this service.
Since DB2 tools does make extensive use of this facility in z/OS, it is possible that users of DB2 tools may experience failures related to Unicode Conversion Services. Impacted users will begin experiencing problems on systems that were IPL’d on 12/15/2015 13:24:57.238528 STCK time or later.
There are many IBM and OEM applications that interface between ASCII and EBCDIC platforms which invoke iconv(), a conversion function. A non-exhaustive list of exploiters of iconv() include:

• FTP / SFTP when they request data conversion
• Java / Websphere applications
• Printing related software (e.g. Infoprint )
• XML toolkit
• Connect::Direct
• LDAP
• DB2 stored procedures