Comments on: Alternative to FTP for file transfer to iSeries (AS/400)

By: djac

djac — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:55:12 +0000

I’ve been following this thread and every time I get to the bit that says:

“our infrastructure team does not want to support FTP on the new replacement server”

I think ‘why the heck not!?!?!?!’

Is it issues with space/performance/security? These can all be addressed if they can be bothered.

Or do they just not want their nice shiny server having anything to do with that nasty old dinosaur of an AS400?

Have you escalated this through management? Perhaps if someone explained to the infrastructure folks that these systems belong to the company, not to them?

Anyhoo, rant over….

From your concerns about performance if the users save directly to and NFS share, it would appear that local saving with periodic collection by the AS400 is still your only realistic option.

How about setting up a medium-spec PC locally to the users to act as an FTP server, or possibly even a NAS drive? Most NAS drives have an FTP server built-in.

By: pmc

pmc — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:45:20 +0000

Thanks Mike,

The IFS Shared idea was one that I had already been considering. The objection to that which was raised is the currently the users save to document to a local LAN drive – a pretty quick operation. Saving to an IFS drive would involve channeling through the communications bottleneck along with all the other jobs/data/etc connecting the data center and our remote site. Our users are used to that local speed and if we degrade their response times, well it would not be a good thing.

By: mcl

mcl — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:41:52 +0000

Can you change the process to go from the PC to the iSeries IFS instead of to the LAN server?

If you can do that you can use QSHELL commands to get a directory listing to a file
(ls -l ifsdirname > qsys.lib/mylib.lib/dirlist.file/dirlist.mbr),
extract the filenames from that file and then use a CPYFRMSTMF command to copy from ifsdirname/ifsfilename to qsys.lib/mylib.lib/myfile.fil/myfile.mbr.

If you can write a program to handle the FTP, setting up something to use QSHELL should be easy…

As far as remote location and traffic – I don’t know what differance it makes if you are transferring from PC to LAN Server and then an FTP to get the files to the iSeries verses going from PC to the iSeries directly..

Regards
Mike Loiodice

By: pmc

pmc — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:30:38 +0000

OK, I got that information… Windows 2003 Server. BTW… I thought Windows server side OS included at least the ability to accomodate an FTP Get and an FTP Dir without extra requirements.

Thanks again

Paul Carpenter

By: bvining

bvining — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:59:30 +0000

What is the new LAN server at the remote location? That is, what type of operating system will it be running.

By: pmc

pmc — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:32:54 +0000

To elaborate on the original description of what is ahppening… Local users get a faxed document into their PC’s. This is converted into a PDF document and loaded onto a LAN server (which was also the original FTP server). The iSeries has a scheduled job which sweeps the FTP server (utilizing the FTP dir command to an output log) and the files present ar FTP’d to a database “flat file” which is then processed to extract the data present.

The whole process goes from received fax to PDF, from PC to Lan Server, before the iSeries even knows about the existance of the document. The PC’s and the LAN server are in a remote location to the physical iSeries and the communications pipeline supports several hundred interactive sessions as well as other miscellaenous functions.

Personally, so far at least I think that the batch FTP process is the least intrusive, but our infrastructure team does not want to support FTP on the new replacement server.

Thanks for the input though, and if you have any (and I do mean any) other thoughts on this I’d love to hear them.

Paul Carpenter
Protective Life, Asset Protection Division