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On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 1:27 PM, Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On a side note, can anyone recommend some books that will get me out of
I-am-an-idiot-AS400-admin ?

Nowhere. Not on any platform. When i started on IBM i 3.5 years back,
i've looked for some good information that

* Wasn't written for idiots
* Wasn't written for people with lots of IBM i experience
* Doesn't have heck-of-a-lot out-of-scope information

I found none. I even went through an IBM course for "IT professionals"
(lasted a whole week), but not much info found there either.

IBM's InfoCenter and Google are good documentation when you're looking
for specific information. One of the main problems the infocenter has
in my opinion is that is often too verbose - for example a 31 step
long Save 21 Checklist, where in a usual case 15 steps don't apply.
This makes it harder for beginners to make sure they're doing the
right thing, but such is life.

What worked well for me is just practice, practice, practice. I get a
few machines, ran backups, restores, release upgrade, release
bare-metal-installation, changed console types, upgraded hardware,
replace harddisks. Only then are you prepared to do this in
production. It builds confidence. If you do something once, get it
running, and then leave it alone for a year - if it breaks after that,
you'll have no longer any idea on how you got it running in the first
place. Documentation will usually tell you the steps, but not the
ever-important WHY.

Of course, i work at a service company. I do up to 10 machines
installations per month and several release upgrades, PTF
installations thrown in for good measure. This helps building
confidence, but it also creates the danger of oversights. Create your
own checklists, instead of using other peoples checklists. This
ensures that you know 100% why each step is there.

Another thing that's very important is learning the basics - the
basics of the technology you're using. One of the most important
things in todays world is networking.

What's just as important is the actual learning technique - don't
learn just steps, learn to concepts too. Everytime you see a
limitation, ask yourself "why is that so", instead of just accepting
is. This makes it easier to apply your knowledge cross-platform -
after all, all computer are more or less the same.

Of course, you don't have to do all that. If you just have one
machine, it might be easier to get a service company to do those
critical tasks for you, as they got the experience with them. Your
machine is at V5R3, support will run out in April / 2009. That's
pretty soon. Now is a very good time to think about moving up to V5R4
or V6R1.


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