AS/400s in the Champaign area

From: Russ Blakeman <rhb57_at_vol.com>
Date: Tue Apr 23 10:18:18 2002

The last one I worked with had a 33,600 Hayes external on it and dial-in was
nice, plus part of the OS/400 had a system to dial out to IBM when errors
occured, to report them to IBM's tech support automatically. Of course this
was a brand new unit that was under lease with IBm so the support function
was all built into the cost. We were tied to an identical unit on T1 that
was the comapny's headquarters in PA as well and they shared together, live
24/7. It was great until the programmers in PA decided to transfer a large
database or run an upgrade program remotely, and forgot that they needed to
set the CPU usage for that function lower - and they slowed our whole
process down for hours. Real bad when the warehouse was in the process of
pulling stock, we were running reports and invoices, and other important
things happening. A 1 second stock item lookup turned into a 7 minute lookup
since PA's cpu usage took priority.

Oh well they were so well managed that the HQ in PA went bankrupt without
warning one day and the KY unit went up for sale to Fleming Foods. Now I
have a feelingt hat Fleming bought it up to eventually close it, to kill
competitors. They have a huge distro warehouse in Goodlettsville (Nashville
suburb) not 120 miles away and this is really nothing compared to their
Nashville area setup. Since the AS/400 is still on lease I guess IBM will
get it back but if I ever get access to their setup (if/when it happens) I'm
gonna get as much from either give-aways or outright sales, as possible.
Terminals, twinax, token ring, routers, CSA/DSA, ethernet managed hubs, etc.
There has to be 50 miles of twinax in the 2 buildings as it is. I know as I
regularly re-ended twinax and type 1 genderless TR connectors that others in
the past had installed sloppily. Of course a crappy routing and a high lift
forklift make for a nice repair job when the forklift catches an overhaed
twinax cable and tears it out.

=> -----Original Message-----
=> From: owner-classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org
=> [mailto:owner-classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Christopher Smith
=> Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 9:03 AM
=> To: 'classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org'
=> Subject: RE: AS/400s in the Champaign area
=>
=>
=> > -----Original Message-----
=> > From: Russ Blakeman [mailto:rhb57_at_vol.com]
=>
=> > Remote dial-in access via an external modem should also be
=> > available besides
=> > terminals (twinax and 5250 emulators) as well as ethernet,
=> > TR, etc - all in
=> > the adapters added to it.
=>
=> You're right. It even came with the 2400bps modem ;) -- and
=> at least one twinax block.
=>
=> Chris
=>
=> Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
=> Amdocs - Champaign, IL
=>
=> /usr/bin/perl -e '
=> print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
=> '
=>
Received on Tue Apr 23 2002 - 10:18:18 BST