Re: Operations Console/Remote Control Panel

Glenn,

I have completed a extensive investigation into this in order to put together a
service offering for our customers.

To answer your first question,  when set up correctly you can take control of
the AS/400 Control Panel in its entirety.  ie you can change the IPL mode type,
Enter DST,  IPL to DST and configure disks if required, even power the machine
down from the control panel.  It is a very useful tool.   This is also relevant
for the console,  you can enter a restricted state and complete a SAVSYS from
the comfort of your home,  it saves time travelling into the office at a weekend
to see if the backups have completed and your nightly batch jobs have completed,
if you are feeling brave even OS installs can be completed as long as someone
feeds the CD's.  Have I sold you on the idea yet?

As for the Hardware,  you need a special cable (IBM would have you believe) for
the MI interface ( its basically a standard Async cable to your com port on the
PC  If you require the pinouts then contact me offline).  for the console again
you require a special cable depending on whether your ECS port is SPD(2699) or
PCI(2721,9745) It has to be the ECS port so you may need to purchase another
adapter and move the ECS line description to the new resource.  A third com port
on the PC is used for the Dial in RAS connection.

The RCS connects using a standard RAS connection (your require your NT user ID
and Password to be active on the LCS) with no Authentication ( this is only to
connect to the RAS server,  you cannot use RAS as normal, it is just for the OPs
Console and RCP.)  If you have configured the LCS as unattended mode and release
control so a user can dial in and access without a person being present at the
LCS then you may have to enter the DST password to get a console session (this
is not the case for the RCP) I do not like this and would prefer to see this
removed and I think your auditors will not like this.


As for LAN connections this can only be achieve with something like PC anywhere
and take control of the LCS.  I believe IBM may be thinking about bringing a LAN
version out in the future.  I am going to be looking at a RAS connection using
PPTP and see if this works but we wait and see.

Hope this helps

Dave




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