RE: Writing to a Windows server instead of to the IFS

Cause your LAN is 100 times faster than the T1? 100 MB LAN (typical
yours maybe faster or slower) T1 = 1.544 MB.

Chris Bipes
Director of Information Services
CrossCheck, Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Booth Martin
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 9:44 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Writing to a Windows server instead of to the IFS

The question that has arise is why is the IFS performance so terribly
slow?

We write a 50,000 row csv file to the IFS. We opened it with Excel.
20+ minutes.
We drag n dropped it to the desktop, 25 minutes.
We opened the desktop file with Excel. 22 seconds.
We drag n drop the desktop file to a Windows server. A few seconds.
We open the copy on the Windows server with Excel, 23 seconds.

The IFS is connected from a remote connection with a T1 line.

Scott Klement wrote:

Hi Booth...

The QDCRDEVD API can give you the IP address of the PC that has
connected to an interactive session. Search archive.midrange.com and

you'll find examples (if you don't, let me know and I'll find one on

my

system... I know I have one, but I'm too lazy to look right now.)

Once you have the IP address, you can tell i5/OS to connect to it via
/QNTC by creating an IFS directory (if it doesn't already exist).

It's

worth noting that i5/OS doesn't normally use IP address (it usually

uses

the host's name instead) so you do have to create the directories

manually.

So here's (untested) program code that creates an IFS directory that
connects to a given PC. The IP address is the one retrieved from
QDCRDEVD. If first checks if the dir exists, if not it creates it.

The

act of creating it establishes the connection to the PC (which may

take

time, so I only want to do it if i have to):

dirname = '/QNTC/' + %trim(IPADDR) + '/CSVShare';
if access(%trimr(dirname):F_OK) <> 0;
if mkdir(%trimr(dirname)) <> 0;
// check errno
endif;
endif;

Now that the share exists, you can write your CSV file to it

filename = %trimr(dirname) +'/' + 'myfile.csv';
fd = open( %trimr(filename) ... etc ... )

Again, you'll have a problem if the userid/password on the iSeries

isn't

acceptable to the PC, or if the PC doesn't have a share set up to

write

to, or doesn't allow the iSeries to connect, etc.

A different approach is to use the smbclient tool from the Samba

suite.

It's a program that runs in PASE and is able to treat a Windows file
share like an FTP server. You sign in with userid/password, and then
can do things like put/get, etc... but that's a whole different
conversation -- still, it might be useful to know there's an

alternative.

Booth Martin wrote:

Man... now i feel even more dense.

Scott, your explanation was, as always, concise and easy to

understand.

However I still can't figure out how to do it. Maybe I can ask the
question in a simple enough way that even I can understand the

answer?

Lets use, for an example, this problem: I want a user, any

authorized

user, to be able to take an i5 menu option, get a screen asking for a

month and year, and then have the i5 gather the data and send that

data

in a .csv file to the desktop of the user that made the request. The

ordinary user will not know the name of his PC, nor the path to his
desktop. I can do almost all of that right now, including writing

the

file to the IFS (thanks to your work). But I can't write to the

desktop.

The issue has importance here because the .csv file is close to 90

megs

in size, and opening the file from a mapped network drive to the IFS
takes forever to open in Excel. From the desktop it opens in under a

minute. We haven't tested it yet but we are suspicious that opening

the

file from a Windows server will also be slow, so we are hoping we

can

write directly to the desktop, which we suspect the user really

wants,

anyway.

At first I felt it was just me being obtuse, stubborn, ans silly, but

as

I ask others that I know are knowledgeable i5 users it becomes clear

to

me that while I may be dense, I am not alone in my denseness.


And! Scott, thank you.

And! Vern, thank you.


Scott Klement wrote:

Hi Booth,

I guess I don't really understand the problem. You say you want to

write to a windows PC. Let's assume that the Windows PC is named
BOOTHSPC and on that PC is a shared named "SharedDir".

You code your open statement like this:

filename = '/QNTC/BOOTHSPC/SharedDir/MyFile.txt';
fd = open( %trimr(filename): O_CREAT+O_WRONLY; S_IRWXU);

That's pretty much it. Just by starting the filename with
'/QNTC/BOOTHSPC/SharedDir' the system will automatically connect to
BOOTHSPC, log in (using the userid/password you're signed into i5/OS

under) and create the file on that PC.

How could it be more easy/straightforward that that?

Things only get tricky when your Windows network won't let i5/OS
connect, or when your userid/password on i5/OS doesn't match the

ones

that Windows accepts.


Booth Martin wrote:

Man, I can be dense. None of these answers look easy & straight

forward.

I am using Scott Klement's examples to write a PC file to the IFS

of the

System i. It uses a path & file name, which of course I expect.

It

occurs to me that one can type in any path name and there is no

real

reason that it won't write directly to what ever is at that path?

But like so many things, it just isn't so. My first question is:

Am I

dreaming? Is it really simple, or is it a lot of hoop-jumping and
therefore of limited value??