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I think you will be pleasently surprised that the gift I am sending out this year is worth quite a bit.

Please note that if you didn’t put in a valid or complete mailing address I have no way of sending your gift to you!

-John Andersen

So be sure and watch this space because on Wednesday I will put up my Christmas sign up list so I can send you a gift. But you will have to act quick because the list will only be available for a couple of days before I take it down.

-John Andersen

So that is why I have been posting lately about things like Query/400, the DB2 database and SQL.

They are simply excellent tools for getting at the data you want and need from your AS/400 and IBM i system. And at some point you definately need data out of your system.

But now it’s coming towards the busy time of year. And before your life gets busy like mine does around the holidays, I wanted to find something out from you my reader and customer.

What Do YOU Want From Me?

I want to know what you would like to see from me. Do you want to know how to create AS/400 reports, CL programs, manage your system, something else?

Based on what you tell me, I plan on sending you a gift just to say “thank you.”

So for the next few days the floor is yours. Go ahead and post a comment to this entry letting me know what you would like.

But here is the deal: I am only accepting 10 comments to this entry, after that I will close comments for this post.

So let me know right NOW what you want before comments are closed.

-John Andersen

http://imho.midrange.com/2011/09/07/the-green-screen-sucks-and-other-heresy/

-John Andersen

I have covered Query/400 in prior blog posts, it is simply a great reporting tool that is really more than a mere reporting tool. It also has a ton of features and many little tricks that I cover in the course.

The special runs from now until Wednesday at noon (Pacific Time, GMT-8). During the special you can pick up a copy of Query In A Flash at a special price of $30. The special is at least 70% off the final price.

But once the 48 hour special is over the price will go up, so act quick and order your copy of Query In A Flash right away by going here:
http://kunaki.com/sales.asp?PID=PX00FJ5AJ9

-John Andersen

Most folks just dive straight on in to the murky waters by issuing the Display History Log command DSPLOG and accepting the defaults. Now while this makes for some rather dry reading, you can usually track down a specific event after half a day of paging through this immense log.

I like to actually use the date parameters to narrow down the field a bit. This helps if you know roughly or specifically what time frame the issue, job or message occurred at.

But what most people don’t realize is that you can actually pare down the log to only specific message IDs or events. So if you are looking for a specific event or occurrence, now you can actually make time spent looking through the system history log useful.

What message IDs should you be looking for? Good that you should ask:

Anything hardware failure related should go without asking. Although you should catch hardware problems by checking the PROBLEM utility or by checking the QSYSOPR message queue, they can go unseen sometimes.

Inquiry messages. The added benefit of the history log is that it still contains inquiry messages even after they have been cleared out of the QSYSOPR message queue so you can go back and refer to them for reference or documentation.

Another option are job start and end times for performance tracking, if you are of the hardcore analytical sort. However you should be using the tools in i Navigator for more advanced performance tracking graphs and data.

To automate the whole process, put these DSPLOG commands into a nifty CL program and dump the results out to a report that you can peruse once a week saving you hours of time pouring over the logs line by line.

Finally a word about the system history log itself. Keep your history log clean and truncated by setting the options in the CLEANUP utility. One time I ran into a system administrator that was keeping 365 days of history logs (among other things like job logs), then wondering why disk space utilization was always so tight. Well duh, the log takes up space.

Besides being over the top, are you ever going to go back and look through logs more than a month or two old? Doubtful, so keep them trimmed to 30 days or less.

Discover John Andersen’s best kept AS/400, iSeries and IBM i secretes by checking out his Power System Jump Start web site.

Now there are many different programming languages you can write for the platform. Generally however you will find a few programming languages that are more commonly used than anything else, those would be Control Language (aka CL) and RPG through its many different incarnations. In some AS/400 shops you may even find some Cobol still lingering.

There is another language or sorts called DDS, and it is used to create screens and database files. But as far as creating database files it is being more or less replaced by DDM which is a more SQL style syntax, but is it not a programming language per se.

Now first and foremost, gone are the days of old school RPG. If you are thinking about writing any RPG II, RPG III or RPG/400 then just stop yourself right there. Many folks outside the AS/400 world are bearish on RPGs future but the reality is it’s still being cranked out by thousands of programmers each and every day because it plainly works so well for the task.

But going forward you should stay at the top of the curve and start writing free form RPG IV. Unlike the more structured RPG free form allows you to use white space to make your code easier to follow and read.

No more having to find those stupid indicators on the far edge of the screen. And for those of you who have been around _know_ what I am talking about when it comes to those blasted indicators.

Free form also has more features to it than just those but that’s for a more in depth conversation. There are other features like modules but those are more complex, advanced topics that you may or may not have a need for.

Next on the list of AS400 programming languages is writing CL. Even if you don’t plan to ever write any complex program or use RPG you will want to learn CL. CL is akin to a shell or bat script on the Win32 platform and they allow you to automate a lot of tasks using the built in command driven environment of the AS/400s operating system. Oddly enough though you actually compile CL programs instead of just running them under an interpreter.

CL excels at administrative tasks or for gluing various program pieces together. For instance when an AS/400 runs through it’s initial program load on bootup its calls a CL program that launches various programs and starts of subsystems on the system. However one drawback to CL is that it’s not really good at reading and working with database files but with it’s built in logic control, looping it’s still a very capable language for building some complex programs.

-John Andersen

First up let’s look at a print screen of the work with active jobs displays showing the jobs RUN PRIORITY

Look at the column labeled “PTY” … To see this column you have to press F11 from the WRKACTJOB display

So the jobs RUN PRIORITY (emphasis added) allows the higher priority jobs (in this case it’s sort of counter intuitive because the priorities go from lowest to highest, so 99 would be very low and 1 would be high priority) to get the best service from the CPU.

So sometimes it helps to crank up the job priority for a job that needs extra processing resources, technically it only needs to be one level higher than the other jobs in the same subsystem. Typically batch jobs run at priority 50 and interactive runs at priority 20 because you don’t want green screen folks waiting a long time while reports can crank away in the background without using up a bunch of system resources.

Now let’s look at a job priority. This is a totally different thing from the run priority we just discussed. The job priority is how a job is sequenced to run while it’s waiting in a job queue. Here is a print screen from the WRKJOBQ command.

These priorities rank from 1 to 9 with 1 being the highest priority.

As you can see from the print screen “JOB1″ has a job priority of 6 which puts it at the bottom of the job queue. So JOB1 will wait until jobs JOB2 and JOB3 have run before it get’s submitted to the subsystem for processing. Also if another job with a higher job priority is placed in the job queue it will still wait it’s turn to run.

Often times people will want to be able to change the run priority of a job, this is accomplished by changing the subsystem configuration including the job description used. But that’s an article for another day.

Another area you will see priorities like this are in the output queues with spool files and they function similarly.

-John Andersen

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.