Re: trimming trailing blanks in spooled output...

   Thanks Paul

   I also have fried tapes ... just about anything can get fried, so I
   believe in redundancy for any long term storage off-line.  Different
   things fail different ways.  I not sufficiently an expert on the
   technology to know how come some things have died, other than the obvious
   tangle.  I suspect shelf life, and tapes being stored flat instead of on
   edge.  My general rule of storage thumb ... if it is comfortable for
   humans, ALL THE TIME, including when humans not there, it is probably safe
   for magnetic media.

   Almost every time we have done a hardware upgrade, the tape media evolves,
   so we are at high risk of having our archives on tapes that are for
   hardware no longer available.  I knew one place that had a burglary, they
   went to their directory of hardware resources & found they could not
   replace their backup hardware, so their offsite backups no good for that
   reason (not an AS/400 reality).  Fortunately for us, several of the 3rd
   party outfits have a museum of old working S/34 S/36 you name it, so that
   if some client needs to access some archives, they can do it, provided the
   media is readable.

   Auditors recently changed for us because top owners changed.  I expect
   they will have a learning curve.  I strive to get them what they ask for,
   on whatever media they ask for it on, but also warn them in advance.  This
   report, that you asking for, will be XXX,XXX pages, in a format that
   cannot be imported into Excel, and it will be unintelligible to Microsoft,
   using the technology our company has invested in so far.

   I recently modified one of the General Ledger reports so its output is
   intelligible to Microsoft, and I am getting a parade of requests to run
   THAT program for various past fiscal periods accounts.  This tells me that
   there has been some progress on a learning curve, with respect to some of
   what I had been trying to communicate.  They got what they asked for, and
   it did not help them.  Then they got a new version of the software for
   last end month, and want that new version retroactive, vs. the original
   old data.

   Getting them reports they need on a one time basis, that recently got run,
   is a different challenge than figuring out what to do with reports from a
   year ago that we need to keep, not know when someone will want access. 
   Right now my boss has got me running ragged, creating reports and sending
   them to Excel, because he is more comfortable figuring things out from
   there, than from the original application's DB2.

   I have developed tons of purge programs, over time add more.

   We are still on V5R1 because of a reluctance to pay through the nose for
   BPCS license move off our AS/400 model 170 to another box.  Some day it
   will die of old age, and we'll have to address how to get our stuff to a
   box that accepts V5R1, migrate as high as it will go, then do again on a
   contemporary box.

   -
   Al Macintyre
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlMac
   http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac
   BPCS/400 Computer Janitor ... see
   http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html