Re: ABCs of OS/400 administration?

Welcome to the iSeries (or 400 or whatever)

I didn't mean to be too flippant about systems programmers. The 400 (or
System 38, its predecessor, in the old days) was actually promoted as
machines that didn't need systems programmers. And in truth, there is a lot
that is built in that is usually written by sys progs on other systems -
logging, history, menus for all kinds of activities, etc. I attended an
AFCOM conference with Help Systems, an operations automation software
developer, in c. 1990. We were almost the only 400 vendor there, other than
tape vendors. The mainframe folk said, "Why do you need operations
automation for the 400? I thought it did everything itself?"

When you sign on, if you come up with the OS/400 Main Menu, I recommend you
explore a little. Try option 3 first - this takes you to the SYSTEM menu,
where you can look at and maintain a lot of the system things you will be
interested in.

If you have seen InfoCenter, you need to know that it's different for each
version of the operating system. The version for v5r1 has, in the lefthand
menu, under "System planning and installation", a "Getting started with
iSeries" entry that will help a lot.

Earlier InfoCenters, like the one for v4r4, were not as organized as the
newer ones. We who are used to hard-copy manuals have a love-hate
relationship with InfoCenter. For v4r4, I suggest you go to the library,
not InfoCenter. And you'll find that a lot of the information in the PDF or
HTML versions of manuals are better, or at least easier to work with, than
InfoCenter's layout. So, for v4r4, go to
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/pubs/html/as400/online/v4r4eng.htm and take
the Category Bookshelves link. From there take the Day-to-day operations
link. In there you will find links like "Basic System Operation,
Administration, and Problem Handling" and "System Operation". Farther down,
under System Management, you want to read the manual on "Work Management"

You asked about QBASE "owning" workstations. That's kind of what's going on
- actuall, it's a mechanism called "allocating" the resource. QBASE and
QINTER and QCTL are what are called subsystem descriptions. These are lists
of attributes that describe a runtime environment. Some systems basically
run with only QBASE - that's how they're shipped, and there's not much
segregation of function with this setup. QBASE is called the controlling
subsystem. In the other way of doing things, QCTL is the controlling
subsystem, and jobs (processes) with different run characteristics execute
in separate runtime environments. Details are in the Work Management book.

Let me also recommend this site on porting to iSeries from UNIX,
etc.  http://www-919.ibm.com/developer/factory/porting/  There's an
overview of iSeries architecture that will be useful, I think.

Please feel free to approach the group with questions, especially about the
parallels between systems. Many have had experience with both UNICes and
with mainframes.

There're some books out there. One is Starter Kit for the IBM iSeries and
AS/400, info
at  http://www.iseriesnetwork.com/str/books/uniquebook2.cfm?NextBook=187

Other sites to try include www.iseriesnetwork.com, which is affiliated with
the primary remaining magazine that covers iSeries. Another site is
www.ignite400.org

Regards - more comments inline

Vern

At 07:00 PM 9/19/02 -0500, you wrote:

On Thu, Sep 19, 2002 at 06:26:51PM -0500, Steve Landess wrote:
> We don't need no stinkin' systems programmers.  The only AS/400 shops I
know
> of that have systems programmers are the ones that also have IBM
mainframes.

Yeah, but someone has to administer the box, right?

True enough

> Jay...what type of information are you looking for?

Hm. Kinda hard to quantify. I'm an experienced MVS systems programmer, and

-snip-

> As far as setting up systems (subsystems, memory pools, tuning, etc.) look
> under Systems Management in the Work Management guide.

Ah, one piece of information I'd been wondering about; the terminals in my
system all are owned (?) by QBASE, yet other AS/400s I've seen use QINTER or
QCTL or... I don't know what the differences are, or why it makes a
difference. (It may not, in my environment, but I'd like to know.)

see above

> For configuration of communications between systems (TCP/IP, SNA, BSC,
etc),
> look under Networking.

I've managed to get TCP/IP configured, and even managed to modify the
startup program to autostart it (though I'll need to revise that, to get the
print writer started after TCP/IP starts up).

Look in Work Management

At this point, I don't even know if I'll have the Client Access host side
stuff installed when I get 5.1 running, or if it's an extra-cost feature on
top of the client programs. Since one of the purposes of this box is
development of something that will talk to Client Access, that's kinda
important.

To see what you have, type

go licpgm

at a command line and press enter. Then take option 10 - installed products

> There is also a plethora of Redbooks for the iSeries:
> http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/Portals/AS400

I'll have to look around there.

Basically, right now I feel lost. I don't wanna feel lost.
_______________________________________________

You're not as lost as you feel.