What is AS400?

[BaDaBooM]

Ok, I know it's a mainframe or some kind of proprietary system but does anybody have any links to a guide of the basics? Kind of a AS400 for dummies. I just want to get familiarized with it from a support/admin perspective.

 

[Mean MrMustard]

Here you go. Take aspirin for headaches, Midol for cramps.

 

[LordRaiden]

Yeah, google the answer. To post all the help files for an AS400 here at ATOT that are available on the net would get me banned due to system overload and linking with a vengence.

 

[BaDaBooM]

Oh god, sorry to bother... I just need one good one. Don't you think I already did the google search? I get 5 billion hits that range from books on AS400 for sale to programming on it to completely unrelated topics. I just figured that someone here already had a link to a good source.

 

[newbiepcuser]

I would head over to your book store/libary and then you can probably find a more range on info.

I'm sure the books are sub-categorized for specific AS400 information you need.

 

[OutHouse]

Originally posted by: ELP
Here you go. Take aspirin for headaches, Midol for cramps.

hell yes. everytime my phone rings and its the Missuri Dept of Correction i want to run out of here screaming. They access our ass/400db for various reasons. they are our only customer that uses it and im so sick of supporting it. Problem is i have never had any offical training on it. just here you go Don this baby is yours learn it well. :|

Ok, I know it's a mainframe or some kind of proprietary system but does anybody have any links to a guide of the basics? Kind of a AS400 for dummies. I just want to get familiarized with it from a support/admin perspective.

no you dont.

 

[BaDaBooM]

Originally posted by: Citrix

Originally posted by: ELP
Here you go. Take aspirin for headaches, Midol for cramps.

hell yes. everytime my phone rings and its the Missuri Dept of Correction i want to run out of here screaming. They access our ass/400db for various reasons. they are our only customer that uses it and im so sick of supporting it. Problem is i have never had any offical training on it. just here you go Don this baby is yours learn it well. :|

Ok, I know it's a mainframe or some kind of proprietary system but does anybody have any links to a guide of the basics? Kind of a AS400 for dummies. I just want to get familiarized with it from a support/admin perspective.

no you dont.

correction... I have to.

 

[Apathetic]

Here's IBM's link: www.as400.ibm.com

Dave

 

[vi edit]

What is AS400?

A tool of the debbil! :evil:

I cringe whenever I have to do anything on ours.

 

[Ime]

My company leases nearly a dozen of these beasts. <shiver>

Thank god I don't have to support them!

 

[beer]

Originally posted by: BaDaBooM

Originally posted by: Citrix

Originally posted by: ELP
Here you go. Take aspirin for headaches, Midol for cramps.

hell yes. everytime my phone rings and its the Missuri Dept of Correction i want to run out of here screaming. They access our ass/400db for various reasons. they are our only customer that uses it and im so sick of supporting it. Problem is i have never had any offical training on it. just here you go Don this baby is yours learn it well. :|

Ok, I know it's a mainframe or some kind of proprietary system but does anybody have any links to a guide of the basics? Kind of a AS400 for dummies. I just want to get familiarized with it from a support/admin perspective.

no you dont.

correction... I have to.

You need to learn from either one person who knows how to work them, like an apprentice, or take formal training. This is NOT like learning windows. You can't just buy one for a few hundred bucks to play around with it. Every time you touch one you are going to mess with critical company processes, becuase if they weren't critical they wouldn't be on an AS/400. An AS/400 is an expensive, powerful piece of hardware with an operating system so antiquated that it itself is fearsome, but at the same time is so stable it makes Linux look like WinME. One of the only redeeming values of an AS/400 is it's stability so you know that whenver you touch one, you can easily destroy the work of hundeds of people.

We have a single AS/400 for financial transactions at the company I work at. You need to learn how to interface with them professionally. They are NOT toys like Windows Servers can be treated as. And they do not cooperate if anything goes wrong, either. They are among the most powerful pieces of hardware today, capable of doing just about any sort of computing task in the most secure and fast manner possible, but that comes at the expense of user interfaces.

 

[Slap]

Elemental007 has great advice. We use an AS/400 to run our ERP software. These things never go down. If a device has a problem, simply vary it back on. People think they are old worthless platforms, but IBM is making great advances on the OS every year. The newest version, V5R2 is really stable and has tons of new features. The green screen is what throws everyone off. It did me when I first started working with one. I handle all network operations at my company and in doing so I have to have some familiarity with the AS/400. We have three programmers dedicated to customizing and writing new apps for it. I believe the language they mainly use is RPG IV. Whenever I need to learn something about the AS/400 I use IBM Redbooks.

Don't believe the people that tell you it is an an old worthless platform, it is now the preferred platform for Lotus Domino. You can run a Domino server on an AS/400 that will support easily support thousands and thousands or users. Of course IBM charges a prety penny for these boxes. We recently did a simple processor, memory and disk upgrade and it cost $60K. They charge you like $1000 for an 18GB 15K RPM disk drive and it is basically the same as their SCSI PC drive.

 

[dman]

Originally posted by: Elemental007

Originally posted by: BaDaBooM

Originally posted by: Citrix

Originally posted by: ELP
Here you go. Take aspirin for headaches, Midol for cramps.

hell yes. everytime my phone rings and its the Missuri Dept of Correction i want to run out of here screaming. They access our ass/400db for various reasons. they are our only customer that uses it and im so sick of supporting it. Problem is i have never had any offical training on it. just here you go Don this baby is yours learn it well. :|

Ok, I know it's a mainframe or some kind of proprietary system but does anybody have any links to a guide of the basics? Kind of a AS400 for dummies. I just want to get familiarized with it from a support/admin perspective.

no you dont.

correction... I have to.

An AS/400 is an expensive, antiquated piece of hardware with an operating system that is so stable it makes Linux look like WinME. One of the only redeeming values of an AS/400 is it's stability so you know that whenver you touch one, you can easily destroy the work of hundeds of people.

They still make/sell 'em new. Wouldn't call it antiquated unless it actually is an old one... But the AS/400's are now called iSeries and have many roles. Hunt around support site for 'redbooks'. Might be some stuff there that is helpful... but really a training class (actually a few) is in order--if you are being expected to support it.

 

[beer]

Originally posted by: dman

Originally posted by: Elemental007

Originally posted by: BaDaBooM

Originally posted by: Citrix

Originally posted by: ELP
Here you go. Take aspirin for headaches, Midol for cramps.

hell yes. everytime my phone rings and its the Missuri Dept of Correction i want to run out of here screaming. They access our ass/400db for various reasons. they are our only customer that uses it and im so sick of supporting it. Problem is i have never had any offical training on it. just here you go Don this baby is yours learn it well. :|

Ok, I know it's a mainframe or some kind of proprietary system but does anybody have any links to a guide of the basics? Kind of a AS400 for dummies. I just want to get familiarized with it from a support/admin perspective.

no you dont.

correction... I have to.

An AS/400 is an expensive, antiquated piece of hardware with an operating system that is so stable it makes Linux look like WinME. One of the only redeeming values of an AS/400 is it's stability so you know that whenver you touch one, you can easily destroy the work of hundeds of people.

They still make/sell 'em new. Wouldn't call it antiquated unless it actually is an old one... But the AS/400's are now called iSeries and have many roles. Hunt around support site for 'redbooks'. Might be some stuff there that is helpful... but really a training class (actually a few) is in order--if you are being expected to support it.

No. Reread what I said. It is very fast and efficient, but like others have said, it has a 'green screen' interface very similiar to that of the 70s. The paramters of the functions that you have to type in, too, are very complex and not easily understood. Nor can you just hit 'F1' when you get lost and get a nice little popup. Everything you have learned about Windows, Linux, and BSD, etc, are in no way applicable to the AS/400. I am not doubting its stability or speed. It is so stable, in fact, that we actually had to look up how to turn it off, when we had to take the building power out once. No one had remembered actually having to do that...and our IT staff has been there for abotu six years.

Learning an AS/400 by yourself from scratch with no prior mainframe experiece would be like learning general relativity with a second grade math education. You could do it, but you would have to satisfy a lot of dependencies and co-requisites as you progressed...and there are better, more efficient ways that teach-yourself-in-14-days with the AS/400. It isn't like WIndows, Linux, or any programming language - you really can't learn it from a book.

 

[vi edit]

in fact, that we actually had to look up how to turn it off, when we had to take the building power out once. No one had remembered actually having to do that...and our IT staff has been there for abotu six years.

Mine has a nice menu when you log in as the security officer that provides critical systems tasks...adding users, doing backups, shutting down the system, ect. I can do a shutdown with about 5 keystrokes on ours. Don't know if that's a standard thing, or if it's a custom screen built by our software guys.

 

[beer]

Originally posted by: vi_edit

in fact, that we actually had to look up how to turn it off, when we had to take the building power out once. No one had remembered actually having to do that...and our IT staff has been there for abotu six years.

Mine has a nice menu when you log in as the security officer that provides critical systems tasks...adding users, doing backups, shutting down the system, ect. I can do a shutdown with about 5 keystrokes on ours. Don't know if that's a standard thing, or if it's a custom screen built by our software guys.

I'm pretty sure that's your proprietary software. But our AS/400 is about 4.5 years old, running a considerably older OS....so YMMV.

 

[vi edit]

I'm pretty sure that's your proprietary software. But our AS/400 is about 4.5 years old, running a considerably older OS....so YMMV.

Ours is a 2650. It's about 2.5 years old running OS 4.5 I believe.

 

[Slap]

Yeah it is now called the iSeries and the commands can become complicated. We have written shorter custom commands to use instead of the long IBM ones. For example...... WAJ for work active jobs, WOQ for work outq, SPW for start print writer, etc. That helps a lot. The green screen really bothers people, but with the newest iSeries Access Ops Navigator you can do 95-98% admin using its GUI.

 

[beer]

Originally posted by: Slap
Yeah it is now called the iSeries and the commands can become complicated. We have written shorter custom commands to use instead of the long IBM ones. For example...... WAJ for work active jobs, WOQ for work outq, SPW for start print writer, etc. That helps a lot. The green screen really bothers people, but with the newest iSeries Access Ops Navigator you can do 95-98% admin using its GUI.

Yea, the OS has always had extremely powerful macro-like support...at least I know that much.

 

[Slap]

Man you do have old systems. Just shows how rock solid they are though. We have an 820 running the newest OS V5R2.

 

[BaDaBooM]

interesting.... learning a little just by reading this thread. I don't need to become an expert at it. I just need to be familiar enough with it so I don't look at it like it's an alien device.

 

[dman]

An AS/400 is an expensive, antiquated piece of hardware with an operating system that is so stable it makes Linux look like WinME. One of the only redeeming values of an AS/400 is it's stability so you know that whenver you touch one, you can easily destroy the work of hundeds of people.

No. Reread what I said. It is very fast and efficient, but like others have said, it has a 'green screen' interface very similiar to that of the 70s.

Sounded like you were saying the hardware was antiquated... which I'd disagree with. But I understand your point now.

 

[BaDaBooM]

Hey, I guess more what I was looking for was just kind of an overview. Like just some facts like is it command line, or gui? Does it only run on IBM? What kind of hardware is it? CISC, RISC, or something else? What's the name of it's filing system? stuff like that. Just anything like that you all could tell me or have a web site that tells that.

 

[KingNothing]

Originally posted by: BaDaBooM
interesting.... learning a little just by reading this thread. I don't need to become an expert at it. I just need to be familiar enough with it so I don't look at it like it's an alien device.

....so you can BS your way into a job or what?

 

[Slap]

They are now RISC based processors and most admins use the command line. Their is a GUI software for admin though. It is called iSeries Access Operations Navigator. The AS/400 is an IBM server. It is IBM hardware as well as an IBM OS. It uses IBM's DB2 database. I wish I could tell you everything you need to know, but I just know enough to be dangerous.

By the way, you can actually run Linux on the new iSeries machines. You can also you what is called LPAR to partition off the processor and use part of it for the production environment and part for a test environment.