Re: Upgrade woes

Hi Larry,

You're so right, and it is more than the hardware! In fact we had a
perfectly workable solution in place to keep this client going until IBM
suddenly decided not to give out keys for 'old' hardware OS in case of
upgrade from feature to feature. (If we had known this was going to happen
we would have upgraded all 12 countries in advance.)

Actually the SSA key only looks at the model, not the feature code. So we
would have been able to grow within the model with two or more upgrades,
from 4gb memory to 8gb to whatever it is on the 2064, from 1-way to 4-way,
and from 240 interactive CPW to 1050 CPW, which would have seen China
through several years more production using BPCS. There is a long-term
plan to move off i/BPCS anyway. Probably now their only route is to join
some of their fellows on the box in Thailand - the Thais just scraped in
under the wire with their upgrade order (these are all second user boxes
by the way) and are now happily working on an 820 with 8Gb and 1050
interactive and 300Gb dasd, and oodles of spare capacity.....! Trouble is,
the Chinese work so damn hard that the interactive capacity is never
enough;)
Though the UK box (with the US also on it) is struggling too. Maybe, like
old times, we'll have to get them to 'schedule' their invoicing and
picking to certain times of the day and have countries in different time
zones sharing boxes!

cheers,

Clare

Larry Bolhuis wrote:

I believe they are *HOSED.

You say they are maxed on Memory in their machine so that path is used up.


They cannot upgrade the CPU or even interactive without causing the system
to request a new key. In addition they may need i5/OS keys. As was
previously mentioned they may also need keys from the BPCS folks anyway.as
most third party keys also will go bust when the model or feature codes
change.

More disk units MAY help (some) but not likely to be noticeable unless
current disk I/O usage is high (40% or more) This at least won't cause
key pain.

Frankly I put it on the doorstep of companies like Infor for charging
Mon$ter fees for some of these upgrades. Should the customer get the key
for free? ABSOLUTELY NOT because the vendor has to do some work, has value
in their intellectual property and so forth. In addition the customer
continues to get value from the software they are running or they wouldn't
use it. Maybe a one year maintenance charge or something along those line
for the new keys but it needs to be a number that doesn't cause the
C-level folks to pass out.

It's also possible that they could have gotten the keys much cheaper had
they stayed current on maintenance. (Of course maintenance isn't free
either and those charges too can be out of line.) We often see the charge
for new keys exceeding the cost of the hardware, sometimes many times
over. In one case a customer, hmmm BPCS, was told their $70K hardware
upgrade would trigger a $1.3M (YES $1,300,000.00) software charge!!! This
included NO new version, NO new function, NO additional users, JUST KEYS.
I don't care who you are this cannot be justified. Wonder why some people
leave i? Well this is one reason.

Not all software vendors get the fact that one i can run many things, all
at one time and in concert one with another. As a result they price their
software only by machine size and not by usage. This forces customers to
move lightly used applications to other platforms where they can get a
smaller one 'cheap'. Then the customer is faced with integration and
communications issues between these multiple servers - problems they
don't have when all the components run together on i. Truthfully there
aren't many applications that can't be priced by usage one way or another.


Unfortunately this has the effect of lowering the number of customers for
the software vendor AND the i. To compensate the answer is often 'Raise
Prices' which......

- Larry


Larry Bolhuis IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert -
System i Solutions
Vice President IBM Certified Systems Expert:
Arbor Solutions, Inc. System i Technical Design and
Implementation V5R4
1345 Monroe NW Suite 259 eServer i5 iSeries LPAR Technical
Solutions, V5R3
Grand Rapids, MI 49505 IBM Certified Specialist
System i Integration with BladeCenter
and System x V1
(616) 451-2500 System i IT Simplification: Linux
Technical V5R4
(616) 451-2571 - Fax iSeries System Administrator for OS/400
V5R3
(616) 260-4746 - Cell
If you can read this, thank a teacher....and since it's in English,
thank a soldier.





Clare Holtham <Clare.Holtham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
07/21/2008 07:47 AM
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Subject
Upgrade woes






Hi again,

Does anybody know of a way to upgrade a 720 within the 720 range without
ending up with no operating system?? I have a client in China who are
maxed out on a 2062 and desperately need more memory and more
interactive capacity. However they missed getting their upgrade order
(to 2063) in under the wire when IBM recently decided not to honour OS
keys when people upgrade old hardware. They can't upgrade to a newer box
because they are stuck with the model their BPCS Key works on, unless
they pay telephone numbers to SSA/Infor for a new key.
Any ideas?????

thanks,

Clare

Clare Holtham wrote:


Hi guys,
Does anyone know what this IBM task is/does???

thanks,

Clare

Scott Klement wrote:

Hi Jerry,

Just in case it's not clear: Whether something is or is not in your
home directory has nothing to do with whether you can call it
(unqualified). Whether you can call something without listing the
folders it's located in is based on your PATH (or PASE_PATH). So if
/home/jerry is in your PATH, you can run your script without qualifying
it. Putting the home directory in your PATH is not a common way of
doing things on Unix systems. More typically, you'd have a directory
named /home/jerry/bin that'd you'd have in your path. On Unix systems,
the home directory is used for a plethora of different things, and it'd
be too hard to manage if you used it as a place to store executable
scripts. I mention all of this because I'm not sure whether or not


it's


clear to you... but it's probably not the problem at hand.

The problem at hand is that you haven't told PASE which shell to use.
Without a shell, there's no command-line environment to interpret your
shell script. The searching of the PATH is part of the logic in the
shell, as is environment variables, wildcards, etc. IF you don't


start


up a shell, then you have to run an actual executable program (and one
that doesn't need the services supplied by the shell.)

When you call qp2term with no parameters, it automatically selects the
default shell for you, and starts it up. That's why your script works
from that -- because you DO start a shell in that case.

However, when you run qp2shell without specifying the shell as the


first


parameter, no shell is started, so your script won't work.

Try doing this instead:

CALL QP2SHELL PARM('/QOPENSYS/bin/sh' '-c' 'tstcat.sh')

The first parameter is the name of the shell -- /QOPENSYS/bin/sh. That
starts up the shell. The next parm, -c, tells the shell to start a
command. Finally, the last parameter is the command-line that the


shell


is to run.

Hope that helps.


Jerry Draper wrote:


I logon to a v5r4 i5 as jerry.

From a command line I do a:

CALL PGM(QP2SHELL) PARM('tstcat.sh')

tstcat does this:

#! /QopenSys/bin/sh
cd /xfer/tst//inbound
cat * >lckbox.txt
exit

tstcat resides in the /home/jerry folder

I can run tstcat from qp2term after I do a cd and it works fine.

From a command line it says:

i5/OS PASE program not found or in use. Path name is tstcat.sh.
Error loading i5/OS PASE program tstcat.sh. See previous messages.

I made sure the permissions were ok.
The records in tstcat.sh end in LF so that's ok.
I can run it from inside qp2term.

The problem is that it is not finding the tstcat.sh in the home folder.

I know this works.

What am I missing?

Jerry