Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

We’ve just received a new System i from IBM, and are preconfiguring it for deployment at the customers site.

Part of this process is configuring ESA - the Electronic Service Agent. While i still think that it is a very cool function (which is also available on Windows on System x machines), it is very quirky with lot’s of interesting problems you will encounter when configuring it.

I’ve followed my own manual for configuring ESA - which worked fine, but the test with QS9AUTOTST failed, and produced message CPIEF02 in the QSYSOPR message queue.

This error message is as generic as it could get, so i had a look at the ESA logfiles (GO SERVICE, Menupoint 14).

It had this wonderful and descriptive error message:

07/06/01 12:07:31 QS9PRBSND : ECS Failed for Problem 0715240986.

Okay, now i at least knew which program was the culprit, and had a look at the joblog of QS9PRBSND in the QSYSWRK subsystem.

And there it was:

Nachrichten-ID . . . . :   CPF8C17
Sendedatum . . . . . . :   01.06.07      Sendezeit  . . . . . . :   11:36:20

Nachricht . . . :   Anmeldung fehlgeschlagen.                               

Ursache  . . . . :  Der Anmeldeversuch am IBM Servicesystem war erfolglos.
Fehlerbeseitigung:  Den Servicegeber verständigen und diesen über den
  fehlgeschlagenen Anmeldeversuch sowie den Rückkehrcode informieren.
Technische Beschreibung  . . . . :  Der Rückkehrcode ist 00000110.

Okay, so i had an interesting return code to go with. While i found several references to CPF8C17 and MSGCPF8C17 (a nice trick to find more IBM material), none of them mentioned the return code i had.

So i opened a call with IBM. I got my answer rather fast - the system i had doesn’t exist. I had to wait one or two weeks until their systems knew about new shipments, or so i was told. I’ve had this working with other systems before, though. It’s still just very, very confusing that a multi billion dollar corporation doesn’t know when it ships new systems.