• Admin Alert: Running Green-Screen Commands from OpsNav, Part 1

  August 2, 2006 Joe Hertvik

  Because their operating systems are grounded in 5250 green-screen commands, i5, iSeries, and AS/400 machines have always had problems gaining acceptance in a graphical world. IBM responded to this issue years ago by creating the iSeries Navigator program (OpsNav), a graphical interface for the i5/OS operating system. However, Windows users still occasionally need to run text-based 5250 commands. To solve that problem, IBM added a Run Command facility to OpsNav. Run Command is a somewhat valuable OpsNav feature that allows you to graphically enter and send batch i5/OS commands to an i5 partition for execution. This article is the first

  …

  Read more

• EDTF and End-of-Line Delimiters

  July 26, 2006 Hey, Ted

  I have an IFS file whose lines are terminated with a carriage-return and line-feed combination. I need them to have a line-feed character only. Is there a quick way to strip out those carriage-return characters? –Bob Here’s an easy way that has worked for me. First, make a backup copy of the file, in case something goes wrong. Now, use the Edit File (EDTF) command from a CL command line to open the file. EDTF STMF('somefile.txt') Press F15 to display the EDTF options screen. Key 5 in the Selection blank (the first entry field on the display). Tab to the

  …

  Read more

• Another Super-Easy Way to Copy a Spooled File from One Machine to Another

  July 26, 2006 Hey, Distinguished IT Pros

  Did you catch the tip A Super-Easy Way to Copy a Spooled File from One Machine to Another that appeared in last week’s issue of Four Hundred Guru? Well, gradford did, and he (she?) contributed another easy method to move spool files from one AS/400 (iSeries, i5) system to another. Here it is: We have a lot of remote AS/400s. To handle the printing issue, we create remote output queues, each one of which points to an out queue on another AS/400. Any spool file that goes into the remote out queue will automatically be sent to the out

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: Automatic Ways to Assign Group Authorities to an Object

  July 26, 2006 Joe Hertvik

  Authority assignment problems can occur when users create application objects. For some software packages, objects must be owned by a specific user. For other objects, related user group profiles must possess certain object authorities. The result is that administrators sometimes have to tweak object authority after an object is created. Fortunately, i5/OS and OS/400 have a fairly easy way to automatically assign object ownership and authorities to user groups when a user creates an object. The automatic group ownership and authority features I’ll discuss here were tested in OS/400 V5R3, but they are available in earlier V5 versions, the current

  …

  Read more

• Don’t Depend on Arrival Sequence

  July 19, 2006 Hey, Ted

  We have a sequential (i.e., unkeyed) database file that contains several years of shipment transactions. We’ve built a lot of indexes over it, and we slice and dice it daily, all day long, from both programs and queries. We have two problems that surface occasionally. The first problem is that sometimes we are not always able to see shipments in chronological order. Since we only store a shipment date, but not a time, we depend on the order in which shipments are loaded into the file to tell us which shipment occurred before another. Depending on the order in which

  …

  Read more

• A Super-Easy Way to Copy a Spooled File from One Machine to Another

  July 19, 2006 Hey, IT Jungle Forums

  The following question was posted to the online forums at IT Jungle: We are getting a new iSeries and upgrading to V5R3. At present, we are on V5R1. We plan to run parallel for testing. Is there a way to move the output queues and/or their contents to the new machine? —pmslic Here is the answer that RussK provided. I just found a note I’d made on iSeries Navigator: “In a multi-system environment, you can even drag from an outq on system ‘A’ to an outq on system ‘B’, and the spooled files will move from one system

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: PC5250 Session Files–Where to Find Them, Where to Store Them

  July 19, 2006 Joe Hertvik

  One big pain in configuring iSeries Access for Windows PC5250 sessions is determining where to store your session files and how to create shortcuts so that your users can easily locate and launch their 5250 sessions. Like many things in the computer world, however, session file management is not as clear cut as it should be. But there are a few simple tricks for simplifying the process on a Windows desktop. What Are PC5250 Session Files? As you probably know, PC5250 session files are executable Windows files created by using the PC5250 emulation program in IBM‘s iSeries Access for

  …

  Read more

• Unix Calls from OCL

  July 12, 2006 Hey, Ted

  Our shop runs a System/36 emulation environment on an RS/6000 AIX machine. We want to move this environment to an i5. In our current situation, we issue a ton of Unix calls within our OCL procedures. We have over 5,500 of these calls. We’re trying to wrap our arms around understanding the impact/feasibility of the move to the i5. If we can’t continue the Unix calls “as is,” going to the i5 probably will not happen. We plan to keep the RS/6000 along with the i5. So, in a nutshell, is there a way to issue the Unix calls from

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: Moving a Subsystem into its Own Shared Pool

  July 12, 2006 Joe Hertvik

  i5/OS subsystems are segmented system environments where work (jobs) is submitted and executed. Subsystems can be customized for the type of work being done (batch, interactive, server), how much work is simultaneously executed, and what resources are used for job execution. This week, I’ll look at how you can use shared pools to assign dedicated i5/OS main storage and active threads for subsystem job execution, without having to share these resources with another subsystem. How Subsystem Shared Pools are Created and Assigned For newer i5 administrators, this first section discusses how system shared pools are put together and provides some

  …

  Read more

• Query/400 Handles Zero Dates (Sort Of)

  June 28, 2006 Hey, Ted

  I have a file that has two dates that are stored in eight-digit numeric fields in YYYYMMDD format. Using Query/400, I wish to find the difference in days between the two dates. However, one of the date fields may contain values of zero. When I view the resulting data from the query on my display, Query/400 fills the difference field with plus signs if a date is zero. But when I direct the query’s output to a disk file, the query ends abnormally. Is there a way to replace the zero date with some other value, such as the current

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles