Category Archives: iSeries

Same old same old

ZDNet is running an article titled “IBM overhauls iSeries for the long haul” where it’s discussing how IBM has revamped the iSeries (AS/400 … i5 … name du’jure) for the modern age.

I dunno … I still don’t see a ad’s on the TV touting the iSeries. I think there were some implied iSeries ad’s a few years ago … where the exec was all in tizzy because their server room was empty … except for a single black box (looked like an iSeries) … and a lone tech was walking out the door and said “We consolidated all the servers on the one box” (which is kind-a / sort-a what LPAR allows you to do) … but iSeries was never mentioned … just eServer.

Of course the biggest problem that iSeries faces these days is summed up by this final quote in the article:

You can run a Web server on an iSeries,” Eunice said, “but try to find yourself a Web programmer who has experience in that, or find yourself someone who’s an expert in Microsoft Exchange and also AS/400? Good luck.

Which is, unforunately, quite true.

Computers – then and now

At work, our ITS support person is going to be transplanting our development system from one set of hardware to another (slightly more powerful).

He sent out an email annoucing that he would be doing a full system backup tonight (always a good idea when doing a major system change). He indicated that he would be running the backup from home.

I responded …

You wimp … back when I was doing upgrades we had to wait hours for the system to prompt us for the next diskette.
Of course, trying to lift a 200mb hard drive would give you a hernia … instead of having to worry having about it getting lost in your pocket change 🙂

That got a laugh.

iSeries Blogger Button

Ok iSeries Bloggers … now WE have a button!

I would suggest you reference it like this:
<a href="http://www.iseries.ibm.com" title="IBM iSeries -- For when you can't afford to be out of business"><img src="/images/iseries-button.png" alt="IBM iSeries"/></a>

Feel free to use the button graphic on your site … but, please, copy it to your own server instead of referencing mine 🙂

If you do decide to use the image … trackback to this post. Maybe I’ll setup an iSeries blog agregator sometime.

gethostbyname pays attention to blanks?

I was working on my current project at work today and ran into an odd problem … a host name (that existed) could not be resolved.

The only different thing about the host name is that it was retrieved from an iSeries using JDBC.

I could ping the host without a problem … so I knew it was valid, but the “InetAddress.getByName()” method couldn’t resolve it.

After a while I noticed that the ending quote for the host name field wasn’t showing up in the variable debug window (of WDSC). So I added a “String.trim()” to the end of the “ResultSet.getString()” and getByName() was able to resolve the name.

I would have thought that getByName() would be able to deal with blanks on the end of a host name.