• The ARCHIVE Utility

  March 22, 2006 Ted Holt

  The code associated with this story is available for download here. I’m happy to present a utility I wrote that has proved to be useful to my employer. It’s called ARCHIVE, and it provides an easy way to make a backup copy of a physical file member, just in case something goes wrong during a job. Before I present the ARCHIVE utility, let me explain why I wrote it. In a perfect world, all database files would be journaled and all database-processing programs would run under commitment control. If anything were to be found amiss–which would never happen in

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• A Java Developer’s First Deployment on the iSeries

  March 22, 2006 Mike Brown

  While I have over 26 years of development experience, I never had the opportunity to deploy an application on the iSeries until recently. So, right off the bat, let’s be clear: I am not a Four Hundred Guru! Initially, the iSeries looked very different from the systems I’ve worked on in the past. However, as I learned, it can also look familiar. The purpose of the application was to read and parse XML files provided by a business partner and to store their contents in an iSeries database. The client’s developers then had access to the data they needed

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• Admin Alert: Moving Printer Devices and Remote Outqs Between Systems

  March 22, 2006 Joe Hertvik

  In recent columns, I discussed the ins and outs of moving entire libraries between i5/OS partitions when you are installing software or you are migrating libraries in advance of a corresponding partition migration or a hardware change. This week, I am setting my sights on smaller game as I detail the ups and downs of moving a system printer device or remote output queue between partitions. The most common reason for moving printer objects to a secondary system is to prepare a new partition that will replace an existing partition and all of its functionality. You may also need to

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• How to Cancel a Job

  March 15, 2006 Hey, Ted

  I have what I hope is a simple question. A CL program that runs in batch mode calls an RPG program, passing parameters to it. If the RPG program finds a certain error, it sets one of those parameters to a certain value, sets on the LR indicator, and ends. At this point, the CL program ends, but the message that it generates gives the caller the impression that the job ran OK. How do I make the program end abnormally? –Mike That’s a good, basic question, Mike, and I understand why you bring it up. This phenomenon drove me

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• iSeries Security Journal Receiver Management, Part 2

  March 15, 2006 Steve Martinson

  In the article, iSeries Security Journal Receiver Management, Part 1, I described how the OS/400 operating system logs security events that occur on your system in journal receivers associated with the QAUDJRN journal in library QSYS when iSeries security monitoring is activated. Also recall from Part 1 that you can set these audit journal receivers to record different types of security events, such as a change to a system value or user profile, or an unsuccessful attempt to access an object. The journal information can then be used: To detect security errors and violations To plan migration to a

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• Admin Alert: Two Tricks for Better Printer Control

  March 15, 2006 Joe Hertvik

  There are so many valuable printing options in i5/OS and OS/400 that it’s easy to miss some techniques for improving spooled file processing. I discovered that this week when I found two tricks that allowed me to automatically suppress printer load form messages and to segregate printer output so that I can print different sets of reports that should not be mixed on the same printer. Here are the techniques I found and how they can help in your shop. Trick #1: An Easier Way to Suppress Printer Load Form Messages In an earlier column, I presented a technique for

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• Perform the Impossible: Update a Multi-Table View using INSTEAD OF Triggers

  March 8, 2006 Michael Sansoterra

  Sometimes using SQL to perform simultaneous inserts, updates and deletes against related tables can be a chore. It would be convenient if programmers could simply treat related tables as a single table for the purpose of modifying data. For simplicity, consider the following common scenario: An iSeries has multiple item tables holding data related in a one-to-one relationship. Often, this scenario is due to multiple application packages having item master files that are both populated with common item data. The illustration in Figure 1 below shows an item master table from Application A along with a supplemental custom item extension

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• Installing WebSphere and the Update Installer

  March 8, 2006 Hey, Brian

  I followed your directions explicitly regarding your instructions to me as to how to install WebSphere Application Server 6.0 on our new i5. I must admit that the process was so foreign to me that I had no clue as to what was happening, but by following your directions it all seemed to work. But I still have a problem. You don’t know how happy I was when well after an hour of running that QSHELL SCRIPT to install WAS 6.0 Express, it finished scrolling all its messages and it made me feel that all was well. To be sure,

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• Stopping i5 UPS Usage Before Something Ugly Happens

  March 8, 2006 Hey, Joe

  We recently installed an i5 520 machine. We also experienced a power failure that lasted longer than our UPS could sustain, and the system wound up ending abnormally. Do you know how to set up an i5/OS system so that it automatically shuts down its partitions during a power failure? I have searched the IBM knowledgebase in vain. — From the IT Jungle Forums Yes, IBM provides a way to do this with the Uninterruptible Power Supply Delay Time system value (QUPSDLYTIM). According to IBM, this value is available for several different versions of the OS/400 and i5/OS operating system,

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• A (Relatively) Easy Way to Process Parameters as an Array

  March 1, 2006 Dominic Lefevre

  In Printing from Qshell, Ted Holt lamented that there seems to be no useful way to treat parameter lists in RPG programs and procedures as arrays, as the C language does. This need arises for me every once in a while, and while I’ve never found a completely satisfactory way to handle it, I have found a way that works. First, it might be good to provide an example in C, for those who do not know that language, in order to illustrate the advantage of treating parameters as an array. The following C program prints out the parameters

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