Re: ABCs of OS/400 administration?

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?

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

Hm. Kinda hard to quantify. I'm an experienced MVS systems programmer, and
Unix systems administrator. I've got a shiny new (well, to me, anyway) 170
that I got off eBay, and have since added disk and memory to (a total of 320
MB RAM and 4 4GB disks, in a parity-protected configuration), and am about
to embark upon upgrading from 4.3 to 5.1 (if IBM will ever get me the
media!). I feel lost and adrift, and want to fix that.

I understand how MVS and Unix go together, what pieces do what, and how they
interrelate. I can take that knowledge and figure out how to do what I want
to do. I'm looking to acquire a similar level of knowledge about OS/400.

Case in point: the LaserJet printer issue I asked about earlier this week.
(I've since gotten some very good information on the subject.) Until that
discussion, I didn't know that printer queues and printers were two separate
things defined (or definable) separately.

I spend a lot of time poking through menus to find the thing I'm looking
for, for just about any value of "thing". I'd like to cut down on that.

> Go to the iSeries information Center:
> http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/html/as400/v5r1/ic2924/info/rzahgicmain.htm

There's a lot of information there (and I have the CD-ROM version), but as
with MVS, half of the job is knowing which book to look in to find the
information you need.

> 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.)

> 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).

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.

> 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.