Re: Cheaper Servers?

Hello Rob,

You wrote:
>I am not saying that 5250 is evil.  What I was saying, regarding
>presentation, is that some people would not be happy with any client other
>than 5250 and the other fellow's argument for xWindows, or any other
>graphical presentation, would be stomped upon by the '5250 only' mantra
>chanting crowd.

You do have an obvious preference for OpsNav and so sometimes it is hard to
differentiate when you complain about 5250.  I was questioning your
complaint about presentation.  I don't actually care what client is used to
connect to an AS/400.  I do care about being forced to use something I
don't like.  The ONLY reason for something like OpsNav is that it gives the
appearance of being modern and satisfies the ill-thought requirements of
our current crop of IT purchasers because few people in the modern world
look below the surface (if they did the advertising industry would die
overnight).

Besides, the bulk of the information provided in OpsNav is TEXT.
Displaying that text in a resizable box with pretty borders is gilding the
lily.

>You never had that ability.  You always had to rely upon a 5250 client.
>That 5250 client may have been a 3196 terminal, but it was still a 5250
>client.  Trust me.  I've had the system console break and plugging in a
>new model, correctly addressed, did not come to life.  Details were
>previously on this list.  400 kept chugging along.

I think you (and the others who argued this point earlier in this
discussion) are drawing a very long bow here.  Conceptually a 5250 device
is a client but it is a damn sight easier to configure and get working than
the alternatives.  Requiring OpsNav or OpsConsole as the only means to
completely configure an AS/400 creates many more potential points of
failure.  Is my failure to connect due to OpsNav (missing fix-pack),
Windoze (missing fix-pack, needs booting, today's Tuesday), TCP/IP
configuration, DNS, or routing issues, dodgy network card, cable etc.  At
least with 5250 terminals the possible sources of failure were less (bad
device address, broken terminal, dodgy twinax, knackered controller) and
were easier to locate and resolve.

I regard a 5250 terminal as the native interface for an AS/400 and that is
what I mean when I say I want to configure my AS/400 from my AS/400.  I do
not want to embark on a windoze/network troubleshooting exercise just to be
able to move an LPAR resource.

OpsNav and OpsConsole simply increase the complexity of my environment
without giving me anything truly useful in return.

I do agree with the idea of an embedded console of some sort but I wouldn't
really want to see a S/38 built-in squishy screen again.  The idea of a
dedicated display card and keyboard port being built into an AS/400 so I
can simply plug in an off-the-shelf monitor and keyboard strikes me as a
good thing.  The display card becomes just another form of controller and I
would be quite happy with a text-only interface being displayed on the
console since its purpose is for configuring the system and a GUI does not
make that any easier except for the technically incompetent and they have
no business configuring a system of any description.

I suspect this is another of those tomato/tomayto arguments that can't be
adequately resolved.  If you like OpsNav then fine and maybe IBM have to
provide it for marketing reasons, just don't force those of us who don't
like it to use it -- give us our command-line alternative.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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   FlyByNight Software         AS/400 Technical Specialists
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