Odds and Ends

Dear Readers:

Here is more miscellany for your enjoyment.

--Ted

Question:

Where do I go for help with ASCII printer problems?

Answer:

Here are two links that Bruce Vest gave me. The first is Support for Various ASCII Printers.  The second is Configuring a Remote Output Queue. Both Web pages are good for V3R2 and above, including V5R2. Both have lots of information and additional links to information about different printer models, different printer vendors, different types of data streams, and the like. Together, they are everything you ever wanted to know about iSeries printing but were afraid to ask. Bruce came across these pages when he was told that the new Xerox all-in-one printers wouldn't work with LAN attached AS/400 printers.  These pages proved that was wrong.

I get a lot of questions about printers that I can't answer. There are so many types of printers, and each one has its own control sequences. Maybe these links will help a lot of you.

Question:

Sometimes when the system is slow, the CPU percentage at the top of the screen shows all plus (+) signs, but none of the individual jobs shows a high CPU percentage. Do you have any idea what is going on in those cases?

Answer:

It's probably a communications error recovery problem. Are users turning off their PCs without signing off the iSeries and disconnecting the Client Access connection? Improperly terminating Client Access causes the system to try to recover the device.

Change system value QDEVRCYACN to ENDJOBNOLIST. This is equivalent to ENDJOB OPTION(*IMMED). No recovery action is taken, and no overhead is incurred.

This error also indicates that your iSeries is probably short of memory. You may need to add some more.

Question:

I am trying to get the QSPROUTQ API to work, and I can't get the receiver variable to work correctly. I know there is a trick to using APIs but can't remember it.

Answer:

You defined the four-byte binary fields as four-digit binary fields. Define the binary fields as 10-digit integer values, and the API will work correctly.

D Wrong                          4b 0
D Right                         10i 0

This is a very common mistake.

Question:

A lot of the source code examples I see these days are written in free-format RPG. What advantage is there to learning and using free-format RPG, instead of fixed-format RPG IV? The obvious advantage that I see is that I'm increasing my skill set, but other than that I'm not sure I can see an advantage to coding in free-format RPG.

Answer:

There's no advantage to free-format as far as making the machine do your work.  Free-format won't make the computer do anything that fixed-format won't do.  But free-format languages have gotten much more popular since RPG first came out decades ago.

The advantage of using a free-format language is that you don't have to worry about keying something in the wrong place and getting a bad compile or a logic error.

I have been using free-format RPG under V5R1 on the Netshare400 machine for working up examples for Midrange Guru and Midrange Programmer. But I haven't done any production work with free-format RPG, as the machines I've been working on for the past several months have all been at V4 releases. One thing I don't like about free-format RPG is having to key a semicolon at the end of every command. I wish IBM had adopted the same method that Visual Basic uses. VB requires me to put a continuation character at the end of every continued line, so no terminator is needed for each operation.

But that is a mere annoyance. What I absolutely despise, loath, abhor, detest, execrate, abominate, and just plain hate is the lack of support for the MOVE, MOVEL, and MOVEA op codes.

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