Re: Line descriptions

Two things following up on this.

First in my 'Clean up your i' presentation which I do at a lot of user conferences I discuss cleaning up old crud. These tend to be land-mines and use a bit of resource during startup. They also add confusion "Do we user that? Should be active? What does it do?" and similar questions but of course these are only asked when stuff is busted and that's a poor time to be figuring that out!

Second leads to "Larry's law for communication configuration on IBM i." It reads like this:

'When creating any configuration object on IBM i, you should select the default for any parameter for which you do not have a specific reason, tech-doc, or direction from support to change.'

The reason for this is that those defaults were set by IBM and were set to be the proper value for most situations. Changing values that you do not understand can cause issues that, well, you don't understand! I have had to troubleshoot connection problems caused by what seemed to the uneducated to be reasonable changes that actually prevented communication! One of them cost my customer a $50,000 EDI penalty from their customer!

With your cleanup you likely got rid of something from 'long long ago' that no longer is best practice or potentially wasn't a good setting in the first place!

I am also working on a set of sessions: "Communications configuration for IBM i." Each session will be short and focus on one object or item such a the Line Description an IP interface, etc. These sessions will be delivered through COMMON.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 5/1/2020 8:01 AM, Rob Berendt wrote:

I had a line description which was really old. Said it was 100M but it was really 1GB. I was having issues with this. Why it suddenly appeared turned out to be a firewall issue which was also affecting other equipment.
Brought the system into restricted state and varied off the line. Could not do a 2 on it. Well, you could but it did not retrieve any current values. Instead it just said *SAME. And when I changed that one parameter it squawked about some parameters I couldn't even find, for example, autocreate controller. The message was basically telling me to delete this and rebuild it. So I thought I would just do a RTVCFGSRC and do that. Noticed that the RTVCFGSRC didn't bring back the bad parameters (which is probably a good thing). When I got done I compared that with a valid line on a like lpar and doctored that up a little. The only additional changes I had to make was remove/change some obsolete SSAP values. Then it worked like a champ. Still had the firewall issues we had to resolve but it was probably a good thing to clean it up anyway.
We have a data center move coming up and I would have hated a coincidence like that hitting at the same time.

7.4

Not a question. Just a shared experience.

Rob Berendt
--
IBM Certified System Administrator - IBM i 6.1
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