It’s the successor of several System p systems (which i know nothing about), and of the System i Model 515 (9407-515). As such, it targets small businesses.

Yesterday i received the first M15, to be installed in for our SaaS (Software as a Service, the IBM Slang for Application Service Provider) Project. This is the first standalone POWER System that i got my hands on, but i’ve already tested running IBM i on Blades.

The M15 is a standard 19″ 4U Server at half depth that can hold dual power supplies for redundant power, has a variety of expansions slots and supports up to 6 internal 3.5″ SAS Disks. The integrated SAS RAID Controller has support for a battery backed write cache. You can also install several PCI-X and PCI-E cards. The system has 2 8x PCI-E Slots, one 16x PCI-E Slot and two PCI-X slots.

In this case, the system came with a HMC - a normal System x3550 configured with a single 320GB SATA Disk drive. Interestingly, we had ordered the same HMC (7310-CR4) half a year ago. Back then, it shipped with a 80GB SATA Drive and an external modem. This unit shipped with increased capacity in the SATA Disk drive, and an internal Modem. Though i have no idea why anyone would still use the modem.

The HMC isn’t very interesting from a hardware perspective either, so the focus is purely on the M15.

The first view on the front shows a new green bar, that symbolizes POWER6. I think it could use a bit of improvement, doesn’t look that nice. Much more interesting is that the control panel has essentially vanished. Like the light path diagnostics model in the System x, it has to be pulled out from the System to be of any use. This was probably done to save space.

The new control panel isn’t an improvement, unfortunately. Of course on systems with the a HMC attached you don’t really need it anymore - but most of the Systems we are going to ship will not have a HMC. The buttons are hard to use and hard to reach - it’ll be interesting doing procedures like 65+21 on those. This isn’t a deal breaker - but from IBM i expect them to get even details as this right - all in all, this isn’t a 1k Dell Server - it’s a 20k High-End IBM Server.

Much better in my opinion is that with the POWER Systems, the IBM i has finally moved to the year 2008 in regard to IO technologies. PCI-E and SAS is finally here. What i do not understand is why the M15 uses 3.5″ SAS Drives, and not 2.5″ SAS Drives. This would allow to fit more arms into the same chassis. e.G. the 2U System x3650 ships with the possibility to install up to 8 2.5″ arms. A 4U machine could have up to 16 arms - without needing more space.

The power supplies have been moved to the front of the unit, similar to the PCI Expansion units. I like it - the new power supplies are bit smaller than the older ones, and replacement is easier, thanks to them sitting in the front.

>The machine internals still seem a bit sketchy to me. The M15 wastes a lot of space that is used for the second CPU in larger machines. But it also has a completely new fan design, with four centrifugal fans in the back of the machine.

The new fan hot plug mechanism is very sturdy, and is comparable to the high quality fan design used in the System x3650. This was one of the biggest downfalls of the POWER5/5+ 520/515/525 hardware platforms that has been fixed in the new hardware. RAM accessibility still isn’t optimal in my opinion - you’ll still need to remove the fans to access the memory. IBM has better solutions for this - just look at the x3550 and x3650.

The fans are very, very loud. The unit we have here is a rack unit and the fact that there is no conversion option like for the POWER5 models might mean that the tower and rack units have different acoustic configurations or different dampeners. While loudness is a complete non-issue in a server room, smaller customers sometimes have the machine in their office. As soon as i get the first tower model i’ll write about their loudness level.

One of the things that’s completely new to the POWER platform is the HEA - the host ethernet adapter. It allows to share a physical NIC with other partitions - that’s a very good feature, but i wasn’t able to play with it yet - this machine is not partitioned.

The BBWC in this machine is now hot pluggable. It’s great to see this, but in my opinion it wasn’t really necessary. There’s a reminder directly on top of it that you need to set the disk cache into an error state before replacing it - and that reminder is very important. If you don’t pay attention to it, you might have to make an unexpected test of your DR strategy.

The expansion and console capabilities of the M15 are artificially restricted - you can not have a PCI-Expansion Unit (no HSL/12X Ports) and you cannot have IOPs in the base unit. The conclusion: No Twinax, No U320 Tapedrives.

Especially the Twinax bit is, in my opinion, a good move. It will force customers stuck in the AS/400 days to get current with all their other hardware like printers. On the other hand, it might also cause those customers to stay stuck with their model 270 or model 800. As for me personally, i’ll have to deal less with Twinax - which has to be a good thing.

The Thin Console, a very good option for Small Businesses, is gone (because HP bought Neoware). With Twinax also gone you now have the choice to either get a HMC for 6k or get a Windows PC and use LAN Console. Both options aren’t really what a Small Business needs - a console that “just works”. The TC and Twinax console fit those criteria. The LAN console has issues on their own (The whole Systam i Access package is … aging) and the HMC requires a boatload of expertise that SMB operators just don’t have. We will go with the LAN console, mainly due to the HMC pricing, but i’m not really content with the console situation on the new systems.

This picture shows the rear of the unit, as you can see the cabling in my lab environment is always top notch. The HEA offers 4 ports by default, a bit much for a standalone system. I’ve implemented a Virtual IP Address setup to create redundant network connections. Not as cool as native Teaming/Bonding support, but it works well enough.

In general, the new model has improved several things on the old hardware, left one or two things in the same state, and has two new issues (the control panel, noise level). All in all, a good solid deal of hardware.

Questions? Comments?

Setting up the hardware

Finally, after almost two months i was able to get my hands on a SAS cable with the correct pinout to connect the TS3100 library to the SAS Connectivity Module. After plugging in the cable, both link lights went up. The TS3100 was connected - physically at least.

I logged into the Storage Configuration Manager, and dared to assign the HS21 Windows Blade and the JS12 Blade to the external SAS Port. When looking at the Windows Device Manager, it immediately recognized the Tape Drive, but didn’t recognize the media changer. No bummer, i haven’t installed BackupExec yet.

It’s important to notice that the IBM i OS will not see your tape drive. You cannot connect the tape drive to the IBM i OS, only to VIOS. This means that you always will do a disk to disk backup to the VIOS partition, and then use VIOS to save the D2D Image to tape. Restoring works the other way around - you restore from tape to VIOS disk, then load that disk into IBM i, and then run your restore or even IPL from the virtual optical medium.

This is not optimal, as this means that you cannot use BRMS to manage media (you can still use it for saving, though). It also adds another layer of indirection that makes automating backups more difficult. Another important point is that other i machines will not be able to read the VIOS created tapes, and that your i Blade will not be able to read tapes created by standalone POWER machines running IBM i.

Configuring VIOS

So i went to logon VIOS, running on the JS12 blade. I ran “lsdev | grep rmt0″, but apparently there was no tape drive to be seen. I ran “cfgdev”, to let the operating system configure devices, but that wasn’t met with success either.

This time, i chose the easy way out. I just rebooted the entire blade, and finally, the tapedrive showed up:

$ lsdev -dev rmt0 -attr
attribute      value            description                               user_settable

block_size     262144           BLOCK size (0=variable length)            True
delay          45               Set delay after a FAILED command          True
density_set_1  0                DENSITY setting #1                        True
density_set_2  0                DENSITY setting #2                        True
extfm          yes              Use EXTENDED file marks                   True
mode           yes              Use DEVICE BUFFERS during writes          True
res_support    no               RESERVE/RELEASE support                   True
ret_error      no               RETURN error on tape change or reset      True
rwtimeout      144              Set timeout for the READ or WRITE command True
var_block_size 0                BLOCK SIZE for variable length support    True
ww_id          5000e1111c878001 World Wide Identifier                     False

Okay. So as the TS3100 is a LTO4 Tape Library, the next step obviously was to load a tape into the tape drive. Now this can be done through the Web Interface or the Control Panel of the library, but that’s not the way you want to go during day to day backup - media moving should be handled by the backup software (called BRMS on IBM i).

But alas, this is not as easy on VIOS. Basically, you can get an AIX root shell on VIOS by typing “oem_setup_env” - and then there are several AIX commands to manage a tape library.

There was only one problem:

# mtlib
ksh: mtlib:  not found.
# tapeutil
ksh: tapeutil:  not found.

They’re not there. A quick google search revealed nothing. I didn’t know how IBM thought how we should use a tape library. In sequential mode? Or is there some way to manage a tape library in VIOS? If you know, tell me!

So, the next step was to create writable optical media, so i could start with creating a Save 21 of the system. This seemed as a sane first step.

Initializing the media on the i side

First, i needed to create a virtual optical volume in a volume library on VIOS - i already had the volume library from the IBM i installation, so all i needed to do was to add a writable optical volume. The system used about 40GB DASD, so i created a virtual optical device with a size of 80GB to leave room for future growth. This process took around 2 hours, probably because VIOS pre-blanked the file (it effectively used up 80GB on disk). A rate of 0.6GB/min. During this operation, the VIOS webinterface grinded to halt (didn’t respond), but SSH was still available and responded very slowly to each command. I suppose this is some issue with the disk controller, either the driver or firmware.

According to vmstat, most of the time is spent in system or IO wait context:

kthr    memory              page              faults              cpu
----- ----------- ------------------------ ------------ -----------------------
 r  b   avm   fre  re  pi  po  fr   sr  cy  in   sy  cs us sy id wa    pc    ec
 1  1 203749  6107   0   0   0 2485 3279   0 150 29483 6542  6  9 77  7  0.18  17.5
 1  1 203732  6167   0   0   0 2464 2869   0 153 30479 6333  7  9 74 10  0.18  17.6

The next step was to load the newly created virtual media into the virtual optical drive that was attached to the IBM i partition. This was rather easy to do, just click through the web interface.

Now, we need to initialize the optical volume in IBM i OS:

INZOPT NEWVOL(’Save21′)
DEV(OPT01)
CHECK(*NO)
TYPE(*PRIMARY)

This finished rather quickly, and i then started the Save 21.

The Save 21

GO SAVE/21. The performance wasn’t much better, though. the vmstat looked the same as above, indicating the same problem.

Further debugging using iostat revealed that a volume group is not a RAID1 array - but nonetheless, the disk subsystem is behaving oddly:

hdisk0, hdisk1: VIOS installation - part of it is mirrored VIOS, other part is volume group that is spanned across these two disks
hdisk2-5: SCSI passthrough to the IBM i

tty:      tin         tout    avg-cpu: % user % sys % idle % iowait physc % entc
          0.0        614.0                0.0   7.7   72.2     20.1   0.1    8.3

Disks:        % tm_act     Kbps      tps    Kb_read   Kb_wrtn
hdisk0           1.0       8.0       2.0          0         8
hdisk1          85.0     20036.0     179.0      10080      9956
hdisk2           4.0     926.0      50.0        922         4
hdisk3          14.0     4481.0      98.0       4477         4
hdisk4          13.0     3730.0      96.0       3726         4
hdisk5           3.0     652.0      36.0        648         4

This is pure sequential IO - why is it reading from the disk? A similar picture was seen throughout the whole backup - even when backing up image catalogs from the IFS. hdisk1 consistently showed strong write activity. No idea why.

My AIX skills are weak, and i didn’t know a way to see on which files the write IO happened - however it’s important to know that read and write always showed the same numbers. To me, this looks like a problem - either in my config, firmware levels, or even a problem on IBMs side.

Either way, the Save 21 completed in 45 minutes. At around 40GB, this brings us to 0.9GB/min.

Backing up the virtual image to tape

The next step is to backup to our LTO4 tape.

Here’s how the backup itself looks:

# find /var/vio/VMLibrary/D2D_1 -print | backup -ivqf /dev/rmt0 -b 512
Backing up to /dev/rmt0.
Cluster 262144 bytes (512 blocks).
Volume 1 on /dev/rmt0
Backup finished on Mon Jul 21 20:45:18 CEST 2008; there are 167772672 blocks on 1 volumes.

And the sequential IO performance is much more reasonable:

tty:      tin         tout    avg-cpu: % user % sys % idle % iowait physc % entc
          0.0        615.0               11.2  29.0   58.2      1.6   0.4   40.9

Disks:        % tm_act     Kbps      tps    Kb_read   Kb_wrtn
hdisk0           0.0       0.0       0.0          0         0
hdisk1          99.0     81920.0     160.0      81920         0
hdisk2          17.0     2250.0      29.0          0      2250
hdisk3          12.0     2236.0      28.0          0      2236
hdisk4          12.0     2385.0      30.0          0      2385
hdisk5          16.0     2250.0      29.0          0      2250

That’s roughly 5GB per Minute. A very decent performance.

Interoperability

Now, this is where it gets interesting. Attached to the BladeCenter S, we have a TS3100 with a single drive, in the BladeCenter S we have three Intel Blades running Windows Server 2008 and one POWER Blade running IBM i.

We need to back up all this to the TS3100 - on the Windows Side, i’ll be using BackupExec 12, on the i Side VIOS. How do i make sure that the tape drive can be used from both sides, without to much interaction?

The SAS Connectivity Module can attach the same port to multiple Blades. So installed BackupExec on one of the Windows Blades, just to see how interoperability would work out.

I ran a backup & restore on another tape, from BackupExec. This worked fine. The next step was loading the tape from the i Save back, and then run a test restore from that. Unfortunately, i couldn’t use BackupExec to just move the tape in the drive, so i had to use the TS3100 Web Interface again.

I looked at the tape drive from VIOS, which also seemed okay. I also saw how much space was used on the VIOS tape after checking it up with BackupExec (this is stored on a small RFID Chip on the Tape itself). But the real test was yet to come:

Restoring from Tape

I started the restore from tape.

# restore -xvqf /dev/rmt0 -b 512 /var/vio/VMLibrary/D2D_1
New volume on /dev/rmt0:
Cluster size is 262144 bytes (512 blocks).
The volume number is 1.
The backup date is: Mon Jul 21 20:24:04 CEST 2008
Files are backed up by name.
The user is root.
x  85899345920 /var/vio/VMLibrary/D2D_1
The total size is 85899345920 bytes.
The number of restored files is 1.

iostat also told me that the performance on restore was bit worse than when backing up:

tty:      tin         tout    avg-cpu: % user % sys % idle % iowait physc % entc
          0.0        611.0               14.7  85.0    0.0      0.2   1.0  101.9

Disks:        % tm_act     Kbps      tps    Kb_read   Kb_wrtn
hdisk0           0.0       0.0       0.0          0         0
hdisk1         100.0     48216.0      68.0          0     48216
hdisk2           0.0       0.0       0.0          0         0
hdisk3           0.0       0.0       0.0          0         0
hdisk4           0.0       0.0       0.0          0         0
hdisk5           0.0       0.0       0.0          0         0

So after having restored the image file to VIOS, i could IPL from it and run a complete system restore. Nice. I didn’t want to scratch my whole setup and wait until a full restore, so i tried something simpler.

In the end, it turned out to be around 2GB/min. This was a lot faster than the creation of the file, which seems really odd to me.

Running a Test restore on the IBM i side

After restoring the file in the VMLibrary, it automatically appeared again in VIOS. I only had to mount it to my IBM i partition. This could easily be done through the VIOS web interface.

I ran a simple restore:

RSTLIB SAVLIB(AVNEDIAS) DEV(OPT01)

With simple results:

12 Objekt(e) von AVNEDIAS nach AVNEDIAS zurückgespeichert.

I also tried IPLing from the virtual optical media, which brought me into the limited paging DST. Nice!

Is this good?

AS you can see, this is not your fathers AS/400. This is a POWER Blade running IBM i. You’ll need to learn a bit about VIOS and AIX in order to make any sense on how this whole stuff works. But it’s not rocket science - i only know a bit about Linux, and was able to figure out the tasks i needed to do.

But now, how should one run this in production?

The current configuration i have seems unsuitable to production to me.

• VIOS/AIX can’t handle the tape library in random mode. This is a big letdown.
• Backing up to tape and restoring seems very, umm, basic to me
• The fact that you are using virtual optical devices, with no ability on the i side to change media, makes a usuable backup procedure hard to implement
• Automation on the VIOS side could be implemented by the i running the ssh client in command execution mode (similar to how this is used with the HMC
• Integration between the Windows and VIOS seems cumbersome

Solutions

Two Half-Height Tapedrives in a partitioned library

The TS3100 can be partitioned, and we could install two half-height LTO4 tapes. Reserving 12 Slots for Windows in Random Mode, and 12 Slots for VIOS in Sequential Mode. This would work, but there’s one huge downside: Price

Backing up on Windows only

Instead of using VIOS and clumsy hacks to get a halfway decent functionality, you can use Windows to backup everything. Save 21 and Systems Saves would run through VIOS in order to create bootable media, and then retrieved on the Windows side using SFTP.

For daily backups, we can use savefiles directly on the i, which is probably easier to deal with for most IBM i admins. These can be retrieved from the Windows side using FTP/TLS. The downside: If you have i and Windows people that work well together, i don’t see much of an issue. But if not, you got a big mess in your hands.

SAS Passthrough to IBM i

Unfortunately, this does option not exist yet. This is something that IBM should work on intensively. It will allow i admins to use well established backup processes with full library integration using BRMS.

Conclusions

Backing up the IBM i on Blade isn’t exactly easier than backing up a standalone POWER machine. In fact, it’s more difficult and requires additional skills.

Before buying a JS12 blade running IBM i, make sure that you think your disaster recovery strategy through completely. Your business partner should be able to help you with this.

Planning is crucial - Backup & Restore on the blade is different, and you’ll need to deal with VIOS when creating a procedure for fully automated Save 21 backups.

Any questions? What do you think about the situation? Want me to test something for you? Just leave a comment!

I also created a “i on Blade” category. Look at it if you want to see all my posts about this subject.

In the meantime i wasn’t just wasting my time on trivial things such as getting actual customer work done, but also playing a bit further with the JS12 Blade.

I’ve installed the software my company produces (DIAS-iS) on the JS12 blade, and ran a few very unscientific benchmarks. But first let’s talk about the disk situation in with IBM i on a JS12 blade in a BladeCenter S (i really like those convoluted product names).

Managing disks under IBM i on a JS12 Blade

As i found out the hard way during the initial bladecenter setup, the JS12 blade only supports SAS disks, and can cause issues if you have SATA disks zoned to it.

There are a few important considerations when thinking about the IBM i/JS12/BladeCenter S combination: First off, disks are directly attached to VIOS, and then virtualized by VIOS for the IBM i as SCSI disks. It’s important to note here that you do not have any (supported) options of RAIDing the disks before the IBM i sees them. So all disks are mapped through 1:1 to the IBM i OS, and then mirrored using IBM i mirrored protection. This is entirely different from the approach you would use in a BladeCenter H with a FC attached SAN.

Just to be clear: There is no cache on the JS12 and there is no way to use any disk protection except IBM i mirrored protection. You can’t use RAID5, RAID6 or hotspares. You can’t VIOS mirrored volume groups either, because it’s unsupported.

I’m thinking about removing one of the disks from the BladeCenter in order to test how recovery from a disk failure would look like, but i’m afraid of wasting a lot of work that i’ve already invested in this system - i’ll try this shortly before i have to give everything back.

I’m not sure what the virtualization by VIOS exactly entails, but i would assume it’s fairly similar to what Hyper-V/ESX do when you create “Passthrough disks”. This probably means that things like Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) will probably not work.

Another, rather obvious, drawback is that you cannot install any expansion cards (well, there is the odd one you can install into the blade). But it also means there is no Twinax, no SNA directly over Ethernet, no Modems, etc. Not a big issue for us, as we’re urging our customers to stay current on technology, but not everyone is an IBM i shop - there are still lots of AS/400 shops out there.

If you access the System i Navigators SST/Disk management function, it will not be able to help you with disk locations. I haven’t found out on how to call disk locations in IVM/VIOS, but then again i don’t really know much about IVM/VIOS.

Installing DIAS-iS on the JS12 Blade

I’ve installed our software without a hitch, and loaded our 30GB Test/Benchmarking database on it. I ran several benchmarks, and the JS12 with it’s four SAS 15kRPM 147GB Arms in a mirrored configuration and one core and 13GB RAM in the IBM i LPAR was a bit slower (less than 5%) than our System i515 with four U320 15kRPM 70GB Arms in a RAID5 configuration and 3.5 GB in the IBM i LPAR.

Unfortunately, i do not have a M15 to pit against the JS12, as these two would be using comparable technology. It would also be interesting to see an M15 with four 147GB SAS disks in a mirrored configuration to compare the systems 1:1, especially regarding disk performance.

Next steps to go?

What’s next? Well, Backup obviously. If you’ve read the i on Blade manual you’ll see that saving to tape will be interesting to say the least. I already have a TS3100 ready to go, but i’m currently missing a SAS for attaching it. As soon as i have the cable, expect a big post about saving and restoring.

Questions? Suggestions? Any specific questions about i on Blade? Want me to test something for you?

Leave a comment or drop me a mail. I’ll be happy to help.

Luckily, this was easy to remedy. Just access IVM and remove one of the cores assigned to the LPAR running IBM i.

IBM licenses it Software based on numbers of Core, not number of Sockets like most other vendors do. This is important to note, because i though the message was wrong as the blade only has a single CPU.

Just two hours ago, i’ve received a shipment of four 3.5″ 147GB 15kRPM SAS Disks. I installed them into the BladeCenter S immediately.

I used SCM to assign the disks in the DSM to the JS12, and then booted the blade.

VIOS was already installed. So all i had to do was to create a new partition.

After creating the partition, i didn’t IPL it just yet. I needed System i Access in order to provide a console. The Operations Console part of System i Access is not supported on Server versions of Windows, so i couldn’t install it on one of the other blades running Windows Server 2008. At least not directly. So i installed the Hyper-V Role on one of the blades, and installed Windows XP and System i Access on it.

I then IPLed the partition and a minute later i was standing there with a lit attention light. I forgot about the CD drive. Bummer. I assigned the media tray to the JS12 blade, but it couldn’t see the CD drive. This must’ve worked before, because i installed VIOS using a CD. I restarted the JS12, but that wasn’t helping. Still no CD drive that i could assign to a partition. Didn’t find much on the web about this problem either, so i decided to use virtual media to install the operating system.

I logged into VIOS using SSH, downloaded the I_BASE_01 CD Image from our production system using FTP, and imported it into VIOS’s media library. I activated the I_BASE_01 CD Image, and booted. I also enabled the operations console connection (which is fairly straightforward, with just in this case the first IBM i instance having the partition ID 2).

After 10 minutes, the signon screen for the operations console finally appeared. That was kind of a Heureka! moment for me, altough i didn’t really do that much stuff yet.

I chose to install the LIC, and i was presented with a screen that i haven’t seen before - i was able to select the which disk i want to be the load source.

After that, the system started to initialize the hard drive. This was really slow on my system, taking around 5 hours for a single 147GB 15kRPM drive. I hope this isn’t indicative of the IO speed we will see when the IBM i OS is running.

While waiting for the formatting to complete, i tried to find a way on how to turn off the attention light that was lit because of my earlier mistake when trying to boot the partition. There is a detailed IBM document about turning off the attention light using IVM/VIOS. It’s a simple command: chled -r sa -t virtualsys -o off

As you can see from the screenshot (took during the middle of the run), it took quite long. In fact, it even exceeded the three hours it estimated and took 4.5 hours. I have an issue with that - the Intel blades do not need that much for initiating a RAID1 set, or NTFS formatting the disks. Even though they’re using slower 500GB SATA disks. It’s just leaving a bad impression for no reason. And it’s also an issue with disaster recovery.

Installing the LIC had a more reasonable speed, took 2 minutes. After the system IPLd again, i was able to add the three other disks. Adding the disks proceeded at a much more reasonable speed, but then it hung at 99%. After two hours, the system was still stuck at 99%. At that time, I went to bed, hoping the system would be finished in the morning.

And it really was finished in the morning. The next step was to start mirrored protection. It even complained that i was running virtual disks, and a failure of VIOS would lead to the system crashing anyway. I proceeded. As always. the first part was pretty quick, and i proceeded with the OS installation.

As the LIC started, initialization of mirroring began. The first time estimate was fifteen minutes. The next one was 6 hours, 10 minutes, then 8 hours. But then i jumped back to 5 hours. I left for a customer, and looked at the status occasionally. I took somewhere between 3 and 4 hours to complete.

Next, i had to change the virtual media in order to allow the OS installation to proceed further. It’s important to know that this has to be done in the partition configuration, not in the virtual media tab. And that you’ll need to acknowledge the partition change in order to make the media change active (the AJAXy web interface doesn’t make this entirely clear).

After that, the IBM i installation started and proceeded at an acceptable speed. In around an hour, the basic operating system was installed.

After that, installation of the licensed programs started. It halted after just half an hour and telling me i had a screen error (MSG CPF3D92). I suspected a problem with the operations console, restarted the XP machine running OpsCon, and retried the installation (with just the base system). The problem happened again. This seemed odd.

Having no idea on how to proceed further, i retried again. This time it worked(?). I figured it was an OpsConsole problem, probably related to the fact that the machine running OpsCon was virtualized. I quickly installed the TCP/IP utilities, IPLd the system and installed the remaining programs using a 5250/Telnet connection.

While the installation happened, i used an additional session to explore the system. The disks where shown to the system as virtual disks, similar to SAN attached disks. But one of the more interesting parts was looking at the Hardware Service Manager in SST/DST - it was completely empty, and didn’t contain any hardware. For me, this was a moment that was quite indicative of the whole experience - i on Blade is not “AS/400 in Blade Form”. It’s a completely new environment that you’ll need to learn to deal with. You got another layer of indirection (VIOS) with it’s own platform (AIX), plus you have the blade management in itself.

The whole setup took me roughly 24 hours (i started a day ago at 16:00). Of course, the system wasn’t always busy because i didn’t give him any work, but it’s worth to note that setting up a JS12 blade takes considerably longer than setting up a model 515 or M15.

I will now continue setting up our ERP application and make further tests with the hardware. If you have any requests for screenshots or want me to test something out, tell me!

The BladeCenter S

The BladeCenter S i received came with 10 500GB SATA Disks and two DSMs, four power supplies, an Advanced Management Module, a Server Connectivity Module and a SAS Connectivity Module. The power supplies use standard 230V type 23 plugs, which do require a little special installation, but much less so than industrial plugs used with the bigger BladeCenters.

The big point about the BladeCenter S is that it does not require an external SAN to provide Storage to the Blade - an integrated SAS Switch that allows very flexible disk configurations is integrated. Configuration can be done using a Webbrowser against the SAS Connectivity Web Interface, using SSH/Telnet to access the SAS Connectivity Commandline, or using a fully graphical interface using IBM’s Storage Configuration Manager. There are some predefined configurations, but none of them suited my configuration - creating new configurations using SCM is easy enough though.

The disks in the BladeCenter’s DSMs (Disk Storage Module) are hot swappable - currently, only 3.5″ DSMs are available, with a 2.5″ DSM in the pipeline. Most of the blades support one or two internal disks, but the problem here is that these disks are not hot swappable. Depending on your Blade loadout, 12 disks might not be enough. For example, the HS21 XM Blades only fit one internal disk, and running without RAID on the System partition seems pointless, so you would be using at least 6 disks (without hotspares) for a basic Exchange deployment.

The Webinterface on the AMM is nicely done, although it lacks a bit of flashiness. That’s not a requirement though, it does a very solid job at what it needs to do.

After powering up the BladeCenter S for the first time, i connected to it using a web browser and upgraded all the firmwares. There are quite a lot of them (AMM, SAS, Server Connectivity), but it all worked out flawlessly. Time to move on to the real course: the Blades.

The HS21 and the HS21 XM

Starting with the familiar first, i started with the HS21 Intel Blades first. The two HS21 Blades both had a 2.66 Ghz Quadcore and 4GB RAM, the HS21 XM Blade had a 2.5 Ghz Quadcore and 9GB of RAM (more about that later).

When starting the first HS21 Blade, after configuring all the storage using SCM, it failed to POST it’s LSI Logic SAS/RAID Controller. I searched for the error message on the net, assuming that i screwed up the configuration. I didn’t find anything meaningful, so i tried to do what everyone else would do in this situation: Apply every Firmware update for the Blade i could find.

Of course it wasn’t as easy as i wanted it to be. The controller not POSTing was an endless loop, i couldn’t get the machine to start from the AMM virtual floppy drive. I used SCM to disconnect the storage (by disabling the Blade’s SAS port). Now, the blade booted flawlessly, indicating that i probably had a problem with my disks. When browsing the IBM website, it became obvious that only newer firmwares support SATA drives. After upgrading the SAS Firmware, i was able to boot the blade without disabling the Blade’s SAS port. Unfortunately, the onboard SAS controller only supports RAID level 1 and 10. Probably owed to the fact that most blades are using SAN storage - IBM promised that there would be SAS RAID adapter that supports other RAID levels - these are especially important for the cost-conscious SMB market.

I booted a Windows PE 2.0 using WDS, and was able to install Windows Server 2008 x64 without any issues.

The HS21 XM blade on the other hand complained when booted for the first time that it’s memory configuration was invalid - it only supports 2, 4 and 8 DIMM configurations - 6 DIMM configurations are not supported. I removed two 512MB modules and booted the Blade with 8GB - it worked flawlessly and without complaining.

The JS12

First, read this document about i on Blade. It explains everything better than i ever could.

The JS12 is a POWER6 based blade that is able to run IBM i. The first time i turned on the blade, all the HS21 blades (already running Windows Server 2008) crashed hard. When rebooting, they no longer found their drives. I turned off all the blades, disconnected the JS12’s SAS port and turned everything on again. The Intel blades booted, and after i was sure that they’re up and running again, i powered on the JS12 again. This time, no issue arised. I tried to reproduce the behaviour i’ve seen before, and the same thing happened again.

My current assumption is that the issues were caused by the SAS Controller which does not have a Firmware update yet, and can’t deal with the SATA drives located in the DSMs. Further investigation told me that there’s no firmware upgrade for the SAS Controller in the POWER6 blade, and that SATA drives are not supported when running IBM i on the blade anyway. I ordered 4 147GB SAS drives, disabled the SAS port on the blade, and tried booting the POWER6 blade again. It booted flawlessly again.

The next step was to install VIOS - this is a rather complicated multi-step process. First, you have to turn on “Serial over LAN” aka SOL, then logon to the AMM using SSH, connect to the POWER blade using serial passthrough and then boot the blade from the VIOS CD. The install is pretty self explanatory, but takes forever. Expect 3 to 4 hours.

Next is connecting to the Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) running on the VIOS partition. The IVM is basically a HMC light minus the console functionality. The only way to get a console on the JS12 blade is using a LAN console (which can only run on consumer versions of Windows, and is not supported on most of the Blades).

I installed the latest VIOS patches (around 4GB) and enabled mirroring on the two 147GB SAS disks in the blade itself. The next step will be installing IBM i, with which i have to wait until i receive the ordered SAS Disks. Installing the patches also takes quite some time, around 30 minutes.

Preliminary Summary

The BladeCenter S is great. Yep, not everything ran flawlessly from the start, but nobody’s perfect from the beginning. The BladeCenter brings an innovative new perspective to the SMB market. The problems that IBM needs to address are the addition of 2.5″ DSMs (already in the works) and more capable RAID controllers (also in the works). A BladeCenter S with the ability to use around 20-40 disks could prove interesting.

The POWER6 Blade is interesting, and while VIOS adds complexity, it is as streamlined as possible. I’m interested about seeing IBM i running on the machine.

If you have any other question about the BladeCenter S - or anything you would like to see in detail, post a comment. I’ll try to figure it out.

It failed with the following error message:

                  Install Licensed Internal Code - Error

Error:
   A device could not be selected to be the load source.

   Return to Dedicated Service Tools and run diagnostics
   to determine why a device could not be selected.
   Correct the problem and install the Licensed Internal Code
   again.

I checked the LPAR Configuration, checked the System Plan, recreated config in the System Planning tool, but all of them said it should work. I checked the disks inside the very limited pre-paging DST, but didn’t find anything wrong.

I posted to the Midrange-L, describing my problem. Not having much experience with LPARs, i expected myself to have set some silly flag wrong.

After a bit discussion with a few helpful repliers, it seemed that there wasn’t anything obviously wrong with my configuration. I checked the schematics again, and digged deeper into the limited DST, but still didn’t find anything. I called IBM hardware support, and he guided me through the limited DST again - then i suddenly saw it: “IO Bus: 1″. The disks were attached to the second channel of the SCSI RAID controller, rendering them unbootable but otherwise completely healthy.

I deactivated the partition, moved the machine out on the drawer and checked the cabling. Yep, it was definitively in the wrong SCSI Port of the adapter. I replugged it, moved the machine back and actived the partition. After a bit of waiting i was able to install the LIC.

But it is only as good as it’s users. A customer called me with a strange problem, related to ExcelliPrint. He told me that he can print on the System i just fine, but the print job just vanishes into thin air. The System i showed the file as being printed, but it was nowhere to be seen on the Windows machine.

I asked the customer if he changed anything recently, he told me no. I’ve used Netviewer to access the customers servers, and have a look at ExcelliPrints logfiles.

At that point, the problem was obious: ExcelliPrint complained that the printer name was invalid. I checked this against the installed printers, and of course the printer ExcelliPrint had another name. After selecting the correct printer, ExcelliPrint continued working just fine and reliable as always.

When asking the customer why he renamed printers, and didn’t tell me that he just said “I didn’t think it mattered”. So much.

GUI5250

Looks old and dated? It isn’t.

XTendGUI wird voraussichtlich ab November 2007 verfügbar sein.

Or, in English: XTendGUI should be available starting November 2007.

I’ve written mostly about my negative experiences, because there wasn’t much else to be done for me. With the most basic tasks like the German language version and Query/400 import failing, we couldn’t experience all the cool things that QU supposedly offers.

While reading the appropriate Redbook and doing the exercises located within, it looks like a necessity to create some more complicated views to avoid of having to do too many custom joins in the report itself. But this entirely depends on your database structure. QU2 can extract information from your foreign keys in order to generate joins automatically, but this of course only works if you’re already using foreign keys (you should!).

As things are right now, all PMR’s i’ve talked about so far are still open and unfixed, mostly because they’re not in IBM’s direct responsibly and have to be forwarded to Information Builders. And they’re all for very basic functionality like changing the language of the product, or of it’s key features - it works properly in an U.S. English environment, but not yet in a #2939 Swiss German environment.

I will hold a small in-house demo to get word about this new product out and i hope that my coworkers have a bit of a more positive mind about the product than i do. We will see. I’ll post progress of my still-open PMRs, IBM is working on a fix, so i’ll hope it is resolved quickly.

For a circumvention you can try either of these:
1) Try to create the metadata with a usrprf with CCSID 37
2) Use this other console (we call it the “metadata console”) at port 11333. Click on “Add Metadata”, Data Adapters, the screen after that will look similar to port 11331

Oh, and there is more fun to be had. The overview list when importing queries does not show the correct text, it forgets about all the umlauts - see the screenshots to the right (PMR 61876,212,848).

Two workarounds, neither of them do actually work. No ETA for a fix yet, because it has to be forwarded to Information builders.

ACTION TAKEN: Reviewed log
java.lang.NullPointerException
at _ibmjsp.console._wfconsolenls._jspService(_wfconsolenls.java:91)

Checked open case with IBI, still no fix.

The customer will need to continue to use English until a fix is
available for this issue.

This is not quite what i was hoping for. I had to wait for a full six weeks to get my hands on QU2 after the release dates, while other people in the USA had it a day after. I know that IBM has to forward all this stuff to Information Builders, but it would’ve been really cool if it worked right from the start.

Right now, i’ve got two PMRs open, for two different problems:

PMR 61859,212,848

The NLS problem that i’ve talked about during the installation has not gone away. I still can’t use QU2 in German, and the administrative web interface doesn’t work right either. I’ve got a callback from IBM this morning regarding the issue, and was told that the problem was already known, and that they’re working on a PTF.

I know that software testing is an expensive process and also costs a lot of time. But this does not look like an issue that could’ve escaped QA that took the whole internationalization thing seriously. I wish IBM/IBI would’ve spent a bit more time on this, in order to release a product that works completely from the get-go. It’s all about impressions!

PMR 61860,212,848

This is a new problem that i’ve come across yesterday when testing basic functionality. I’ve tried to import a Query/400 query definition, and received an error message when trying to do so:

(FOC1740) EXECUTE ERROR system -q "CALL QZDFMDB2 PARM('-t' '-f'
'/qibm/userdata/WebQuery/ibi/apps/baseapp/BUDGET1_call.txt')"

I’ve even tried to use the query provided with the redbook sample library QWQCENT, but this didn’t work either, same error message. I’ve got a callback from IBM about this issue too, and was told that the problem is currently under investigation, and a fix isn’t immediately in sight, again because IBM can’t actually fix the problem - they have to forward it to Information Builders, which are the guys that actually produced QU2 (as part of their WebFOCUS family).

Other drawbacks

When i heard about 5733-QU2, I thought this to be great news for the System i community. Finally a decent, System i based, graphical query application. But there are some serious drawbacks that you need to consider. I fully hope that IBM will try to improve the situation for their customers, but not all of these points are easily fixable. Of course, QU2 is still miles better than the age-old QU1.

• Separate pricing (named user, instead of the 515/525 concurrent user model)
• Separate software maintenance (Why? I don’t understand this at all.)
• Convoluted installation (requiring about 4-6 hours!)
• The slow speed when working with it’s web interface (i expect sub-second response time on every click for an intranet web application)
• Slow report generation speed
• Usability and looks like it escaped from 1995
• Cumbersome data handling, moving away from native i5/OS integration using *LIBL etc. which was very convenient for *QRYDFN
• Incomplete functionality (e.G. can’t delete unnecessary metadata)
• PDF generation doesn’t work completely (that’s even documented in the redbook)

It could look better, really

If you haven’t worked with QU2 yet, see the screenshot to the right. Does this look like a web application straight from the year 2007? No. It looks like it was made and created in 1995, using CGI programs written in C. The response times are awful - i expect a click to have an immediate impact, with barely no waiting time. This is not the case with 5733-QU2. Especially in the Report Assistant, you might have to wait multiple seconds until a window closes or a new one opens. I don’t find this to be acceptable.

Now, IBM can actually make web interfaces that look kinda decent and 2007ish. As you can see to the right, this is the HMC v7 web interface, which actually looks good. I’ve never used it though.

There’s are several products that come pretty close to my expectations of a decent web interface - Gmail< /a>, Google Reader, and the Microsoft Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access (nice flash demo), the latter is also pictured to the right. All of these applications are snappy, react in a sub second manner, are fully interactive, have decent graphical dress, support full drag and drop, and integrate nicely into their native environments.

I’m obviously not the only one complaining - New Generation Software, Inc. published a document about the QU2 drawbacks.

Why doesn’t QU2 look like a decent web application from 2007? Why is it so slow? Why doesn’t it integrate nicely into i5/OS’s DB schematics? Why are there such show stopping bugs with basic functionality?

I DO want a decent replacement for Query/400. I DO want our customers to move into the current time. But IBM isn’t making it easy. I hope though we will have fixes for all these open PMRs soon.

Anyone care to share their experiences with QU2? Anyone already working on a roll out plan?

The product is a single cd, which i’ve put into my laptop, created a CD Image using ImgBurn, and copied it to our i5/OS cd share. After that, i copied the CD image to a model 515 for testing, added it to and image catalog, and mounted the image.

While this was happening, i studied the short included README note. It contained a link to the DB2 Query for Web Getting started page. This page again references APAR II14318, which contains the necessary PTF levels to install this product. The installation guide is in the DB2 Web Query Install Guide.

The first step was to verify that i had all required products installed (using GO LICPGM, 10). There are multiple prereqs stated in multiple documents, i’ve just combined these three lists into one:

5722SS1 Option 3 - Extended Base Directory (installed by default)
5722SS1 Option 30 - Qshell (installed by default)
5722SS1 Option 33 - PASE (installed by default)
5722DG1 IBM HTTP Server (installed by default)
5722JC1 IBM Toolbox for Java (installed by default)
5722JV1 Option 8 - J2SE 5.0 32bit (NOT installed by default)

If you install a new licensed program, it might be necessary to rerun the latest cumulative and group PTFs. It makes sense to combine this with the next step.

I’ve verified that my group PTFs were current (using WRKPTFGRP):

SF99504 - DB2 fixpack level 10
SF99114 - IBM HTTP Server fixpack level 8
SF99291 - Java fixpack level 7

I’ve had higher levels at all products.. If you’re no current on PTFs, you might want to check my writeup about installing PTFs with image catalogs.

But there were more PTF requirements to be met, and you’d also need some special PTFs depending on your language feature code (It’s all in APAR II14318).

I’ve issued the following command to retrieve the missing PTFs through my ESA internet connection:

SNDPTFORD PTFID((SI27813) (SI27814) (SI28336))

The usual QESECARE job started and used up cpu time for about 10 minutes, and then a progress bar appeared. It started to download the PTFs. These three PTFs are about 120MB in size.

You’ll also need to download some more PTFs for use with web query itself. You can download them in the same session, or later. The DB2 web query PTFs are about 650MB in size - while this is not much, remember that IBMs servers are very, very slow - this download can take about 2-4 hours.

SNDPTFORD PTFID((SI28391) (SI28393) (SI28399) (SI28406) (SI28582))

(Only use this command if you’re using lang #2939, for other languages see APAR APAR II14318)

After downloading all these PTFs, i’ve started to reapply the current CUME/Groups (because i’ve installed the J2SE 5.0 32bit Java product), and also the newly ordered PTFs.

After IPLing the machine, i checked if PTFs SI27813, SI27814 and SI28336 were successfully applied. They were. I also checked if all groups were marked “Installed” using WRKPTFGRP. They were.

I loaded the correct image catalog, made sure that the correct disk was selected (F2939_01), and then issued the installation command:

RSTLICPGM LICPGM(5733QU2) DEV(OPTVRT01)

After accepting the license agreement, the installation started. After waiting for about two hours (and watching the RST reaching more than 20′000 objects restored), the installation finally succeeded.

It’s important to know that 5733QU2 needs quite a lot of space, which is not documented anywhere from IBM’s side. You’ll need 650MB for CD Image, which needs about 3GB of space when extracted. Add to that the space needed by PTFs (about 3-6GB), you’re at about 6-9GB of needed space. Those of you running a 595 with more than a hundred 147GB arms might laugh at this, but the lowend 520 machines with two mirrored 36GB disk drives might see this differently.

I do wonder about the final performance of this product, as several IBMers have stated the hardware requirements to be extreme, but the statements are inconclusive because they contradict each other:

Question from Rdandrew: What are the minimum hardware recommendations?

Drmack says: for any query/sql environment we recommend a minimum 8GB of memory per CPU w/ V5R4. We have tested with 600 CPW machines and it runs well there. Typically, 20-25 disk arms keeps your system balanced too.

Question from Dblyth: will the 515 express models run this effectively? they are limited to 8 disk arms, 4 will be typical and 4GB memory will also be typical.

Drmack says: Yes, we think the 515 is a little powerhouse despite your picking up on the fact that is may be under our guidelines for memory and disk I/O

Source

Most of our customers are running IBMs (still expensive) low end machines - 270, 800, 520, 515 with 4 or less disk arms.

Moving on, the next step is installing the 5733QU2 PTFs. This should be done before touching anything about 5733QU2. I started the PTF installer and told it to apply PTFs immediately. This should save me from IPLing the system again (the Java PTFs contained LIC fixes - needing an IPL).

This procedure also needed a lot of time, about two hours (same as the install). At first, the progress of a SAV command appeared, that apparently saved all the files from the IFS into a savefile. After taking it’s sweet time compressing said SAVF, it started a RST command that extracted files from another savefile. Basically, it reran the installation process again (eating more and more time). This would explain why the 5733-QU2 PTFs have nearly the same size as a single CD, but i wonder what IBM’s excuse if for not dealing with IFS based products more efficiently.

While i’m waiting for the PTF installation to finish, i’m pondering the time needed to do this. I’ve started the whole installation thing at around 10:30, and it’s 15:30 right now. That means i’ve wasted about 5 hours just installing a product and it’s necessary PTFs. This wouldn’t sound that bad if we were talking about a low end intel server, but this is a high end server made by IBM, of which i expect the highest performance. A

After the PTF procedure completed, i checked if PTFs SI28391, SI28393, SI28399, SI28406 and SI28582 were applied correctly. They were.

I continued the installation using the command:

CALL QWEBQRY76/REGWEBQRY

The next steps were easy, and fully according to IBMs documentation:

CHGUSRPRF USRPRF(QWEBQRYADM) PASSWORD(mypw) GRPPRF(MRADMIN)
CALL QWEBQRY76/WQADDLIC 'myuser'
Sign on as QWEBQRYADM
QWEBQRY76/STRWEBQRY

The next step was to bring 5733QU2 into it’s German language version - this actually needs extra steps, and it just shows that 5733-QU2 isn’t really integrated with i5/OS (yet?).

You’ll need to enter QSHELL command prompt using STRQSH.
Then you’ll need to enter a command to translate your installation

/qibm/proddata/webquery/ibi/srv76/home/bin/tsgult.out NLSCFG /qibm/userdata/webquery/ibi/srv76/wfs 500 DEU
This will translate according to the CCSID 500 and the german language. It’s important to know that the examples mentioned in the Web Query Install PDF do not work - you need to explicitly specify both the CCSID and the language!

Next step was logging onto web query:

http://IPADRESS:11331/webquery_html/wfconsole.htm

The page took about 5 seconds to load, but it worked!

I logged in using the QWEBQRYADM credentials, and i was logged in. In the top left corner we saw the recent developments of IBMs branding effort System: OS/400. Product names are very important, and in a new product like QU2, i want to see “i5/OS”, and not “OS/400″.

I clicked on the Configuration/NLS Settings button as instructed by the manual. I was greeted by this error message:

An HTTP 500 error has been returned when attempting to communicate with the WebFOCUS web components. The application server log contains information on why this error has occurred. Contact your WebFOCUS Administrator or Information Builders Customer Support Services for further assistance

My first try was to restart web query using QWEBQRY76/ENDWEBQRY, STRWEBQRY commands. This didn’t help.

After a bit of searching i found out that the logfiles are located in /qibm/UserData/WebQuery/ibi/webfocus76/WQLWI7/logs/. I found a few messages which could indicate the problem:

2007/10/15 15:42:55.090 SCHWER Webcontainer : com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.servlet.ServletWrapper : Uncaught service() exception thrown by servlet {0}: {1}([/console/wfconsolenls.jsp, java.lang.NullPointerException]) Thread[HttpServer : 4,5,main] ::class.method=com.ibm.ejs.ras.Tr.error() ::thread=HttpServer : 4 ::loggername=com.ibm.ejs.ras
2007/10/15 15:42:55.128 SCHWER Exception occured in com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.filter.WebAppFilterChain.doFilter ::class.method=com.ibm.ws.ffdc.FFDCFilter.processException() ::thread=HttpServer : 4 ::loggername=com.ibm.ws.ffdc

java.lang.NullPointerException
at _ibmjsp.console._wfconsolenls._jspService(_wfconsolenls.java:91)
[snip]
2007/10/15 15:42:55.142 SCHWER Exception occured in com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.servlet.ServletWrapper.handleRequest() ::class.method=com.ibm.ws.ffdc.FFDCFilter.processException() ::thread=HttpServer : 4 ::loggername=com.ibm.ws.ffdc

javax.servlet.ServletException
at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.filter.WebAppFilterChain.doFilter(WebAppFilterChain.java:166)
[snip]
2007/10/15 15:42:55.204 SCHWER Webcontainer : com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebApp : [Servlet Error]-[{0}]: {1}([/console/wfconsolenls.jsp, java.lang.NullPointerException]) Thread[HttpServer : 4,5,main] ::class.method=com.ibm.ejs.ras.Tr.error() ::thread=HttpServer : 4 ::loggername=com.ibm.ejs.ras
java.lang.NullPointerException
at _ibmjsp.console._wfconsolenls._jspService(_wfconsolenls.java:91)
at com.ibm.ws.jsp.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(HttpJspBase.java:85)
[snip]

I’ve tried a few more tricks, like changing the NLS configuration to 237 DEU, and removing the NLS configuration completely. Neither did work.

I’ve opened PMR 61859,212,848 on this. Let’s see how this turns out. Moving on, i’ve tried to logon to the end user interface:

http://10.33.2.200:11331/webquery/

I was greeted with a really ugly login page, and entered my userid and password. It seems to work fine so far, updates regarding the NLS problems will be forthcoming. It’s 17:19 now, and i’m going home.

Using FTP to transfer savefiles has a few quirks that are non-intuitive at first, and it’s more complicated if you’re transferring from one i5/OS instance to another. I often transfer savefiles from our system to customer systems, with my laptop as an intermediary.

Let’s start with the simple ones:

Downloading the savefile QGPL/TRANSFER to a PC:

C:\tmp>ftp 270.int.dataline.ch
Verbindung mit 270.int.dataline.ch wurde hergestellt.
220-QTCP at i270.int.dataline.ch.
220 Connection will close if idle more than 5 minutes.
Benutzer (270.int.dataline.ch:(none)): lukas
331 Enter password.
Kennwort:
230 LUKAS logged on.
ftp> quote site namefmt 1
250 Now using naming format "1".
ftp> cd /qsys.lib/qgpl.lib
250 "/QSYS.LIB/QGPL.LIB" is current library.
ftp> binary
200 Representation type is binary IMAGE.
ftp> get transfer.savf
200 PORT subcommand request successful.
150 Retrieving member TRANSFER in file TRANSFER in library QGPL.
226 File transfer completed successfully.
FTP: 705408 Bytes empfangen in 0.65Sekunden 1090.28KB/s
ftp> quit
221 QUIT subcommand received.

There are a few important things to notice here: QUOTE SITE NAMEFMT 1 changes the System to use the IFS naming format (you can change the default using CHGFTPA). BINARY switches to binary transfer mode, this is especially important for uploads (i5/OS refuses non-binary savf downloads).

Uploading from a PC or i5/OS instance is essentially the same, so i’ll lump these two together in the next section:

C:\tmp>ftp 270.int.dataline.ch
Verbindung mit 270.int.dataline.ch wurde hergestellt.
220-QTCP at i270.int.dataline.ch.
220 Connection will close if idle more than 5 minutes.
Benutzer (270.int.dataline.ch:(none)): lukas
331 Enter password.
Kennwort:
230 LUKAS logged on.
ftp> quote site namefmt 1
250 Now using naming format "1".
ftp> binary
200 Representation type is binary IMAGE.
ftp> cd /qsys.lib/qgpl.lib
250 "/QSYS.LIB/QGPL.LIB" is current library.
ftp> del TRANSFER.SAVF
250 File TRANSFER in library QGPL deleted.
ftp> put TRANSFER.SAVF
200 PORT subcommand request successful.
150 Sending file to member TRANSFER in file TRANSFER in library QGPL.
226 File transfer completed successfully.
FTP: 705408 Bytes gesendet in 0.69Sekunden 1026.79KB/s
ftp> quit
221 QUIT subcommand received.

Now, the special case comes into play when you’re downloading from an i5/OS instance. If you do not precreate the savefile and overwrite it, you’ll end up with a simple PF-DTA, that you can’t restore from.

CRTSAVF QGPL/TRANSFER
FTP '270.int.dataline.ch'

Es wird versucht, eine Verbindung zu Host 270.int.dataline.ch, Adresse 10.33.0.20 über Port 21 herzustellen.
220-QTCP at i270.int.dataline.ch.
220 Connection will close if idle more than 5 minutes.
> lukas
331 Enter password.
230 LUKAS logged on.
OS/400 is the remote operating system. The TCP/IP version is "V5R4M0".
250 Now using naming format "1".
257 "/" is current directory.
> namefmt 1
250 Now using naming format "1".
Server NAMEFMT ist 1.
Client NAMEFMT ist 1.
> lcd /qsys.lib/qgpl.lib
Das lokale Arbeitsverzeichnis ist /QSYS.LIB/QGPL.LIB
> cd /qsys.lib/qgpl.lib
250 "/QSYS.LIB/QGPL.LIB" is current library.
> get TRANSFER.SAVF (REPLACE
227 Entering Passive Mode (10,33,0,20,73,134).
150 Retrieving member TRANSFER in file TRANSFER in library QGPL.
226 File transfer completed successfully.
33792 Byte in 0.436 Sekunden übertragen. Übertragungsgeschwindigkeit 77.585 KB/s.

There are a few more noteworthy things in this transcription: We used “namefmt 1″ instead of “quote site namefmt 1″. This will also advise the local FTP client to change it’s naming format. We also issue a cd and an lcd command to change the FTP server and the FTP client to the correct diretory. Then, we call the get command with the special (REPLACE parameter, telling it to replace the already existing savefile (and thus preserving the SAVF attribute).

You’ll also notice that IBM still hasn’t updated their branding throughout i5/OS…

Could this be a bug in ExcelliPrint? Doubtful, the symptom is just to strange for a programming error.

But the solution was very, very simple: When i looked at the printer configuration (through it’s Web interface), duplexing was enabled by default. I disabled it, and Windows and ExcelliPrint could print single pages without problems, and both Windows and ExcelliPrint could enable duplexing without problems too.

I would assume that the problem is that the Windows printer driver sends an explicitly disabled duplexing option, while ExcelliPrint only sets the duplexing option when you enable it in the PRTF.

The fact that i haven’t got any interesting project running right now, and IBM isn’t shipping me new toys i just decided to complain about delivery times. This might not actually be interesting.

When it comes to delivery times, my experience with IBM has always been abysmal. The local swiss distributors (Avnet, TechData, Also) are usually low on stock, don’t have any System i stock (automatically giving you 2-8 weeks, depending on IBM’s mood). Software orders also take ages, especially additional software on new Systems (we usually buy 5722-IP1 for our customers to generate PDF). These software orders usually take 2+ weeks after the system was shipped.

Even System x servers are rather hard to come by. While there are usually a few (less than 5) models on stock, additional parts (like disks, memory) are sometimes out of stock too. Out of stock articles usually take up to three weeks.

The situation is even worse with IBM printers - no stock anywhere, and delivery times are 4+ weeks.

Other manufacturers understand their supply chain even for smaller countries like Switzerland. One of the good examples here is HP. You usually have many servers plus parts available on stock - every reasonable printer model (less than 10k) is also available on stock. Microsoft doesn’t have any problem shipping their licenses (one or two days for electronic licenses), and shipping time for media kits is a simple next business day thing.

Why can’t IBM get their act straight and have their (expensive) stuff available on a simple next business day basis?

It’s hard to sell a customer an IBM printer if you have to tell him that it takes several weeks until he gets it. Most smaller businesses don’t buy maintenance contracts for their printers, and just buy a new one when the old one dies - this doesn’t work when you have 4 weeks of lead time for a simple InfoPrint 1532.

One thing i would be interested in: Is this better in the USA? Or in Germany?

Since V5R3, Timezone support was added to i5/OS, and so was support for NTP (both client and server). NTP is very important in todays networked environment:

• For security reasons - logfiles from different sources need matching timestamps
• For business reasons - certain things need to happen at the right time
• For technical reasons - e.G. Kerberos needs a matching time for proper granting of tickets (also see #1)

NTP on i5/OS only works on newer machines - you can’t use NTP with older machines like the Modell 170 (but you shouldn’t be using them anymore anyway). It works fine on models 270, 800, and all recent 5xx models.

Configuring NTP on i5/OS is a one liner, but there is more that needs to be considered. Usually you’ll need a central timeserver in your network that serves out time to all other servers and clients. If you’re using Active Directory, you’ll already have a central timeserver - the domain controller which holds the PDC FSMO role is the primary timeserver in your network. If you’re not using Active Directory, you’ll need to designate a timeserver in your network, and run an NTP server on that machine - this could be your System i, or any other machine capable of running an NTP server.

Sounds complicated? It really isn’t - if you have some networking guys, ask them what they’re using for an NTP server, as routers and switches have the same problem. If you have dedicated Windows administrators, they’ll also know a lot about NTP. If you have neither, you can use an external timeserver like swisstime.ethz.ch or time.nist.gov (for the US residents).

As said, configuration is a oneliner.

CHGNTPA RMTSYS('swisstime.ethz.ch') AUTOSTART(*YES)
STRTCPSVR SERVER(*NTP) NTPSRV(*CLIENT)

Okay, that was actually two lines but the start command is included. That’s it. You’re done. You’ll still need a roughly correct time, otherwise the NTP client won’t adjust the time. And you’ll need a properly set QTIMZON value, because otherwise you’ll get the wrong time.

See the screenshot to the right for an example. I haven’t seen this before, and Google doesn’t have any meaningful results, nor does the new i5/OS Infocenter.

Does anyone know more?

Update: The machine is running LIC V5R4M5 (i wonder why, though - previously shipped 515 did run at V5R4M0). This might be an upcoming V6R1M0 feature for improved OS management of machine firmware.

I’ve found a few good resources on IBM’s website, which i’ve been reading in order to get started as fast as possible.

• DB2 Web Query Quick Install Guide
• Getting started with DB2 Web Query for System i (Redbook)
• IBM Web FAQ
• iSociety DB2 Web Query Chat

When reading the quick install guide, you’ll notice that internationalization has taken a big step backwards. And when reading the iSociety Chat Log, you’ll notice that the hardware requirements for Web Query are extreme - it probably won’t run on a baseline Model 520, but should on a baseline Model 515. But i’m still waiting for the final product to make up my mind.