What I Learned Today

1. I'm learning more then I ever wanted to know about the as/400... We need a new one. So I went down the normal route of using IBM's developer program to get us a new box with a discount - but that ended up costing about $75K ... and considering we have about 2 customers on the platform, it doesnt make sense to spend that much on the hardware. So I went down the used route and found some of the old school (ie not a pseries) hardware for incrediably cheap. Currently we have a 170-2292 ( 220 cpw / 30 cpw interactive) and I'm looking at buying a 270-2434/1516(2350 cpw/ 70 cpw interactive). What I haven't figured out yet is if the extra horse power is going to help us at all. We only have two developers at most working on the system and they use it for interactive compiles our of product and they also use it for interactive compiles of our sample applications that use our product. There is no other work being done on the machine. I looked in the QSYSOPR message queue and didnt' find that we were running out of interactive cpw so I am unsure if we are even processor bound on the machine. If we aren't then I should probably spend the money on additional RAM and disk space as opposed to interactive cpw.

2. I also learned that we have a disk problem on our existing 400.. I was looking in the QSYSOPR message queue for any indication of interactive cpw issues and found a boat load of disk error messages. It seems that I have disk in the array that has died.. oh joy.

3. Last monday I found out that our building is killing the power on sunday morning (tomorrow) for eight hours ! Eight Hours ! Who has a battery powered UPS that can last for eight hours??
Since our website is actually located in my server room I was able to transfer it over to our ISP's hosting service and then get the DNS records updated for the weekend so that people will end up there instead trying to access my powerless "data center" (i use the term loosely). Our ISP also has an mx record for our domain so they will hang onto the incoming email while the exchange box is powerless. So all that is left for me to do is gracefully shut down the 25 development servers and 17 infrastructure servers, NAS, phone system, security system, and then go in Sunday afternoon and turn them all back on. Lucky Me !