Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

Windows Vista is out – since half a year. But the hardware manufacturers are still catching up. While printing on Vista with HP devices works flawlessly now, the MFP front is not that green.

The drivers that are out for the semi-professional MFP devices (like the MFP 3027x) and Windows Vista are for printing only – they don’t contain faxing or scanning software. While the latter isn’t that much of a problem because you can use digital sending from the device (to email, or to folder for the more expensive devices), faxing is an issue. Of course you can print the fax, and then scan it. But that’s pretty ugly (and not to mention expensive in terms of employee time, toner, paper).

Luckily, the HP Fax drivers for Windows XP work without problems on Windows Vista (of course only on 32bit Versions). I wasn’t brave enough to install the HP toolsuite for Windows XP in order to try scanning (too much garbage included).

I think it’s a shame that most manufacturers didn’t have drivers out on 31.01.2007 – the official consumer launch date for Windows Vista.

While setting up a development workstation for use with Microsoft BizTalk 2006, i ran into a very basic, but also very interesting problem:

The BizTalk setup aborted because the event log was full. But why was it full? Simple – installing BizTalk in a Development environment requires installing Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, SQL Server 2005 and of course BizTalk Server itself. But that’s only one part – you’ll also need to apply lot’s of patches to a Windows XP SP2 installation with all this software installed (over 100!).

So, if you’re planning on installing a dev workstation with BizTalk Server on it, make sure that your event logs are configured for automatic rollover, or increase the size limit.

Fancy graphs are only for managers

I’ve heard this one more than once, and it just isn’t true. While hard numbers are good for many things, they are usually not adequate for looking at Network connections.

Especially with the advent of VPN connections throughout multiple ISPs, companies, etc. there is a need to have a less subjective view of the quality of these links. Luckily there are many open source options available for graphical network monitoring.

The most important tool for WAN connections is SmokePing. With Cacti, you can graph almost anything. SNMP support is built in, and you can also use scripts. I’ve used many scripts with SSH commands and public key authentication to transfer even sensitive statistics over the network.

While researching an unrelated issue, i wandered about the big table of font mappings, directly from IBM:

Printer to Host fonts mapping table

This is going to be a big help for anyone that wants to use software fonts from the System i. The main use i’ve had with software fonts was to print OCR-B using ExcelliPrint.

DNS is often overlooked by novices – it doesn’t look to complicated, but in the end it is the glue that holds the internet together.

I’ve written about DNS before (sorry, German only), but i still use all that knowledge i learned back then every day. DNS is important for Active Directory (which has a whole seperate page of possible issues), but it’s also very important for e-mail.

I’ve seen many smaller IT companies or hobbyists that host their own DNS (which is fine, it builds experience) – but usually without a secondary DNS server.

The problem is that without any DNS server responding for a domain, strange things happen. While it would be very clear by the standards that this is just a temporary failure, and the mail should be held in the queue, given the right combination of DNS resolver and MTA, mails may bounce.

There are many companies offering secondary DNS services, but they’re usually not necessary – ask someone you know with a static IP address, and play secondary for him. Or if you really want your own infrastructure, rent a server in Germany, which is pretty inexpensive and gives you a secondary MX and DNS server.

ExcelliPrint is an excellent software package to enable IPDS on a plain, PCL5 capable printer. With release 3.2, Excelliprint now fully works with Host-Resident fonts.

This enables you to print OCR-B from your System i without having to buy the fonts as a printer module, or buying memory for the printer to download fonts to.

Now for those of you who don’t work with ERP Systems in Switzerland – OCR-B is a font used on many Swiss financial documents for better automated scanning of those. It’s usually needed if you print bills with an attached ‘Einzahlungsschein’.

Setting up host resident fonts on i5/OS isn’t difficult, but the whole process isn’t well documented.

So here’s a very quick run through.

First, you’ll need to fonts in 300 DPI resolution on your system. The default fonts supplied as AFP compatibility fonts (5722SS1 Option 8) are 240 DPI fonts, unsuitable for printing.

With your shipping of i5/OS, you should have received a CD called IBM AFP Font Collection. You’ll need to restore three libraries from this CD:

RSTLIB SAVLIB(LA1300) DEV(OPT01) RSTLIB(QFNT300LA1)
RSTLIB SAVLIB(OCR300) DEV(OPT01) RSTLIB(QFNT300OCR)
RSTLIB SAVLIB(CDEPAG) DEV(OPT01) RSTLIB(QFNT300CPL)

If you do not have this CD, you can get the fonts from any other System that has them.

The next step is to create an appropriate font mapping table:

CRTFNTTBL FNTTBL(*PHFCS)

Now you’ll need to add mappings for OCR-B to that table (and also for all the other fonts you use):

ADDFNTTBLE FNTTBL(*PHFCS) PHFCS((3 144 *NONE 1269) (C0920BB0))

This example is just OCR-B. You’ll need other fonts for all your documents to print pretty. You can view your font table with DSPFNTTBL.

The last step is to reconfigure the PSF Configuration Object for your printer to use Host-Resident fonts.

CHGPSFCFG PSFCFG(EXCELLPSF) RESFONT(*NO) DEVRSCLIBL(QFNT300LA1 QFNT300CPL QFNT300OCR)

(Most of the research for this walkthrough was made by Ralf Christen)

We recently had to connect a distributed, legacy system using RS232 to a modern network. One of the main ideas behind it was to centralize it – but this can be rather difficult when talking about RS232 in a variety of locations. We looked around, and found a company that made what we were looking for.

Moxa sells many embedded adapters, we bought the cheapest one, the NPort 5110. In Switzerland, these can be bought from Disdata, and cost about 160 CHF.

The good thing about those devices is that they support real COM operations mode on Windows Server 2003, Vista in both x32 and x64 editions. Many other companies do not yet offer x64 drivers or Vista support.

Without reading any manuals, these thingies were up and running in 10 minutes – this is quite good. A few years ago i’ve worked on a similar problem, and i don’t even remember what product we used – i just know that it wasn’t as easy as it was today.

After upgrading from V5R2M0 to V5R4M0, the ESA is usually completely broken. You can’t even reactivate it by using GO SERVICE, 1.

So, what does one do?

Use WRKOBJ to delete all *DTAARA Objects from the QSRVAGT Library, than run GO SERVICE, 1 again. It will work.

I’m writing this entry because i’ve seen many Google searches looking for information about this.

Disabling the System i5/iSeries/AS/400 attention light is easy, but you should never do this without thinking it through.

First, go into DST or SST. The first can be accessed by performing a manual IPL, or using Function 21 of the control panel after switching the System to manual mode (this can be done during production – it doesn’t hurt). The DST will then appear on the console. STRSST kann be used from any 5250 session.

If you’re running V5R1M0 or later, you will be asked for an username and password. If you do not know these, you will have to reset QSECOFR’s service password using CHGDSTPWD. Please note that after doing so, you can only login in to DST, not SST – you will need to use function 21 to enter DST, change your password, and then use STRSST (this behavior can be changed, but this is the default).

Then, in SST or DST, perform the following steps:

• Start a service tool
• Hardware Service Manager
• Service Action Log
• On the selection screen, press Enter
• Press F6 to turn off the system attention light
• Press F10 to confirm this<7li>

With this, you should be done. Note that you will see the option to use F6 in the bottom of the screen. If you do not see this, then i5/OS does not know about the attention light and your problem lies somewhere else. You should then use the ASMI to turn off the attention light.

Footnote: Yay. The 100th post. I’m actually quite impressed that i made it this far. It seems that i still don’t have much of a readership (very few comments), but according to Google many people are looking for solutions to problems i’ve had too – so i will try to keep it up.

This weekend i upgraded a System i Model 800 from OS/400 V5R2 to i5/OS V5R4. While doing all the preparation for installing i5/OS using Image Catalogs, the image catalog check failed with the following message:

VERIFICATION OF IMAGE CATALOG FAILED WITH REASON CODE 02. LOAD SOURSE TOO
SMALL FOR RELEASE V5R4M0. RELEASE V5R4M0 REQURIES A LARGER LOAD SOURCE.
TO DETERMINE THE MINIMUM LOAD SOURCE SIZE, REVIEW THE ISERIES
INFORMATION CENTER FOR RELEASE V5R4M0 FOR INFORMATION ABOUT ALLOCATING
ADDITIONAL LICENSED INTERNAL CODE (LIC) SPACE. SEE THE TOPIC ON PERFORM
INITIAL UPGRADE OR REPLACEMENT TASKS.

I only read the first part of the message, and rechecked the load source size. It was a 36GB Disk, and V5R4M0 requires a 17GB load source minimum. So that was okay. I reread the message, and now saw the part about allocating the additional space for the LIC. But i already did that, and IPLd the System – while doing so the SRC C6004250 appeared longer than usual. So i assumed it went fine.

I checked using the menus in GO LICPGM, 5, and then the LIC space allocation screen. I was told that the space was already extended. I reIPLd the system, but the problem persisted.

In the installation manual, there is an additional method available by manually calling a program that will then set the flags for LIC space extension.

CALL PGM(QLPALCSP) PARM('V5R4M0' '0')

I ran that, reIPLd the system. Again, C6004250 appeared longer than usual. After that, the image catalog verification ran without issues, and the release upgraded succeeded after some more hours.