We mentioned recently that we are looking to develop a version of RAP which would be suitable for hosting services, this solution would be based around iASP technology but keep the base RAP technology for the replication process. During the initial planning phase we discovered a couple of gotchas which we hope to be able to work round but overall we feel the technology we will develop should make a suitable solution. The next thing we needed was an environment to test some of the theories on, so we set about getting a couple of extra disks for our 515 to set up iASP’s.

First problem was finding a couple of disks but after some digging around we found a supplier http://www.corptechs.com/ who had a couple of drives which would suit us, they had a couple of 35GB disks which should work in the i515 but IBM would not support them! So we went for a couple of used 70GB drives and they arrived in good time from the guys at CorpTechs.. IBM is stating they cannot be included in maintenance still but that’s another story (they said you cant add used drives to maintenance?) At $2,500 for new the cost wasn’t justified in our test environment!

The next problem we came across was the Operations Navigator install we used to discover the drives and manage them kept timing out with a CWBC01048 error. We read through a lot of manuals and tried to make the message go away but it just wouldn’t, no matter how we set up the connections and authorities it just kept timing out. The thing which really threw us was everything else worked, it even worked to the i520 but just would not connect to the i515! We then set about connecting a new PC to the Operations Console via a direct attach cable only to find it also didn’t work! IBM called us late last night saying the system had called home with a problem, we looked at the logs and sure enough it had reported a problem. The attention light was on the system so we then looked at the logs in SST and determined a line failure which was due to the failed Operations Console connects caused a threshold to be exceeded an the attention light was set as well as the message to IBM. Nothing was wrong so we simply removed the log entries and cleared the attention light. Next we attached the Operations Console to the PC we had been having the Operations Navigator problems with and Operations Console came up no problems. We could also now configure the DASD to the iASP’s.

So we had a duff comms port on the initial PC we used to connect the console plus we had a damaged Operations Navigator install on the other PC! (We tried to connect the Operations Navigator again after we had removed the Console cable and it went back to timing out when we tried to view the DASD configurations or start a service window). We decided to start afresh, brought in ANOTHER PC, configured iSeries Access as well as Operations console, upgraded the service packs and connected with no problems to both the Operations Console and the Operations Navigator DASD management functions. We also re-installed iSeries Access on the PC which had the damaged Install on, this fixed it all up and it now works perfectly! We didn’t want to have to keep running to the console to manage the DASD! 18 hours of pure hell turned out OK in the end!

So we now have a fully functioning test environment we can use. Next will be the fun bit of writing the test programs and modules ready for a product simulation.

Chris…

I would like to mention Lukas Beeler as it was his site we went to find the method of turning off the attention light and thanks to CorpTech for providing excellent service and product.