An often overlooked area by system administrators on there AS/400, iSeries and IBM boxes are the system values. These have a surprising amount of control over your system and can greatly improve or hamper the performance of your box.
If you inherited a box that has been pre-configured then the setups for the system values is usually done for you requiring very little intervention on your part. But for a brand new system out of the box you will have to setup the operating system and the values.
The AS/400 system values are basically flags that configure and control various aspects of your IBM system. From security, job control and configuration there is a system value for just about every aspect of administration.
One prime example is the QCTLSBSD value. This essentially tells the operating system how to handle the jobs. Either run everything under one primary subsystem called QBASE or to divvy jobs up into there own subsystems like QBATCH and QINTER for interactive (“green-screen”) jobs.
By default, out of the box your AS/400, iSeries and IBM i will be setup for QBASE. In most all cases, if this is a production box this is something you WILL want to change for improved performance and to prevent jobs from directly competing for the same resources.
To review your system values use the command Display System Value DSPSYSVAL and press F4 to prompt for the values. There are a lot of them and you will want to make use of the F1 key to gather more information about them.
Another important system value is the AUTOCFG value. What this does is tell the operating system that when a device is connected to automatically create and configure the device description.
This can help you out immensely, especially when setting up terminal sessions to connect to the system. It will create the devices for you saving you tons of time and frustration.
Of course there is a drawback as well: when you move a device around like a tape drive it will be treated like another device and be renamed. For instance if the tape device was originally setup as TAP01 it will then be TAP02. When this happens you them have to manually intervene and change the device descriptions to get things straightened out.
And if you have to comply with Sarbox regulations then start becoming familiar with the security features of the i operating system including the system values for object auditing and journaling. These offer allot of granularity when it comes to security auditing.
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