AS/400.....anyone

infamus

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Sep 5, 2006
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anyone here work with an AS/400 like daily?


reason im asking is to get some info. i want to know more about it but there arent too many books out there for it. got any recomnedations besides spending a couple grand to take an IBM class.

james
 
ebay or amazon is where i got mine. my dad is (was... now an IT director) an as/400 programmer. he gave me a 400 once, but never got a lot of use out of it. fantastic hardware and a good market to get into, it's fairly niche-like. best fileserver you can get, but starting to become a rather rare breed.
 
AS400's are extremely stout machines. What exactly did you want to know?
 
i too have an as/400 sitting in storage, simply because i have no clue what to do with it.
forever it ran my grandpa's workers comp server
 
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sadly enough I work with it daily. I f*$&#*! hate it. I did know they used it until after I took the job I never used it before either. According to talk where I am at they are phasing it out within the next year so they want windows people for when the swap happens. Run like hell from learning it trust me its a system that is slowly fading out and no one is missing it. We just bought a blade system that does the same job for all of our as/400 machines.
 
annilation said:
sadly enough I work with it daily. I f*$&#*! hate it. I did know they used it until after I took the job I never used it before either. According to talk where I am at they are phasing it out within the next year so they want windows people for when the swap happens. Run like hell from learning it trust me its a system that is slowly fading out and no one is missing it. We just bought a blade system that does the same job for all of our as/400 machines.

This man speaks the truth.
 
i hope to god theyre phasing it out. it so reminds me on an old public library terminal.


it runs the casino and hotel i work at and it runs EVERYTHING! anything from the slot machines to the guest check out of the hotel.

i just want to learn a little more while im still working where im at. only to make myself more valuable. more value=more pay (supposidly)
 
Fat chance of that.. a lot of major banks run it as do major corporations. While I simply cannot stand OS400 I'd put an IBM iSeries/AS400 hardware up against any Wintel machine.
 
infamus said:
i hope to god theyre phasing it out. it so reminds me on an old public library terminal.


it runs the casino and hotel i work at and it runs EVERYTHING! anything from the slot machines to the guest check out of the hotel.

i just want to learn a little more while im still working where im at. only to make myself more valuable. more value=more pay (supposidly)

Trust me do not spend a minute learning this system. It is the devil avoid it like you would the plague. Take that time and learn windows server, unix, anything but AS/400 trust me. At work its like watching the Titanic sink. We have a group of AS/400 guru's (about 10 of them all with bloated salaries) that I doubt will have jobs in 6 months.
 
shade91 said:
Fat chance of that.. a lot of major banks run it as do major corporations. While I simply cannot stand OS400 I'd put an IBM iSeries/AS400 hardware up against any Wintel machine.

Amen to that.
 
annilation said:
Trust me do not spend a minute learning this system. It is the devil avoid it like you would the plague. Take that time and learn windows server, unix, anything but AS/400 trust me. At work its like watching the Titanic sink. We have a group of AS/400 guru's (about 10 of them all with bloated salaries) that I doubt will have jobs in 6 months.
And they likely know that with AS/400 skills, it doesn't matter who employs them, they will always have a job somewhere.

Government orgs use AS/400s. Like DoJ stuff. There will always be a place for an AS/400 engineer, whatever everyone's opinion of it is.
 
XOR != OR said:
And they likely know that with AS/400 skills, it doesn't matter who employs them, they will always have a job somewhere.

Government orgs use AS/400s. Like DoJ stuff. There will always be a place for an AS/400 engineer, whatever everyone's opinion of it is.

You would be surprised how little as/400 stuff there is. I went to 3 productions buildings for the federal reserve not a thing involving AS/400 or even IBM. Did some work for northup grummen, nothing. Did some work up in DC for the goverment nothing. Phillip Morris in VA has a lot of AS/400 but are trying to phase it out. Circuit City Corporate has AS/400 working out phasing it out, it slowly dying there. I do a lot of contract work because I love the seeing a new environment every 3-6 months and I havent seen much of it. AS/400 is slowly dying there might be jobs now but they are getting slimmer.
 
Just like any other "endangered" platform, don't waste your time learning it.
 
Dang why all the hate for the 400, I used one everyday for over 2 years, my current job I use it every now and then when a client has a problem. The system is a tank, I have yet to see one go down from a software crash (power supply blew out at my last job, which took part of the system down).

They are out there, Banks, hospitals, construction companys still use them. I for one like the system, its powerful and you can let it chug along with no major maintence like on a windows server.

Guess i'm just rare but I still like the system.

Oh the book I had was "starter kit for the IBM iSeries & AS/400" if you are interested.
 
k1pp3r said:
Dang why all the hate for the 400, I used one everyday for over 2 years, my current job I use it every now and then when a client has a problem. The system is a tank, I have yet to see one go down from a software crash (power supply blew out at my last job, which took part of the system down).

They are out there, Banks, hospitals, construction companys still use them. I for one like the system, its powerful and you can let it chug along with no major maintence like on a windows server.

Guess i'm just rare but I still like the system.

Oh the book I had was "starter kit for the IBM iSeries & AS/400" if you are interested.


It's little things like this, maybe our 400s are setup wrong but anytime you unplug the network cable you have to do commands to bring TCP/IP back up. Seems completly stupid to me.
 
the thing that really gets me is all the damn messages that need to be replied to, that crap drives me crazy. oh and also the fact that half of our users bearly passed high school :eek:
 
we use it at my job (government) and i hate it. people keeps touting how dependable it is, but the hardware crashes like any other hardware. it's not the impervious to downtime like some people want to believe.

i personally hate the damn thing. we have a bunch of as/400 programmers, and they're the wierdest group of people ive ever met my whole life. they're trying to phase it out for a windows based platform because no one wants to use that god awful menu based system anymore. i dont think its going anywhere though. a lot of big companies and the govt use it like has been said.
 
You can build a GUI for the system. And if your system goes down as often as some of you say, what series are you running, i have run the E and I series and never had a problem with either, i have more problems out of out damn unix boxes than i ever have had out of a 400.

Yeah the hardware can fail at anytime just like any system. Any piece of hardware will do that
 
They're the most stout machines on the market. They have a level of quality control that Dell/HP could only dream of. I've worked on at least 30 different AS400's in the past 5 years. Only 1 had a problem that baffled even IBM's techs that we had come on-site (RAID backplane issue). They're a tough machine to learn and even tougher machine to integrate services with in Wintel/Lintel networks. Major banks run them (WaMu) as do small banks (they generally lease access from an ASP). Major warehousing and logistics applications run on them as well. The only thing dying out about them are their admins. They will be around for a very long time. To the haters who insist that the AS400 is garbage and dying out - thank you very much. The less of you there are the more consulting jobs I get on AS400 work.
 
shade91 said:
They're the most stout machines on the market. They have a level of quality control that Dell/HP could only dream of. I've worked on at least 30 different AS400's in the past 5 years. Only 1 had a problem that baffled even IBM's techs that we had come on-site (RAID backplane issue). They're a tough machine to learn and even tougher machine to integrate services with in Wintel/Lintel networks. Major banks run them (WaMu) as do small banks (they generally lease access from an ASP). Major warehousing and logistics applications run on them as well. The only thing dying out about them are their admins. They will be around for a very long time. To the haters who insist that the AS400 is garbage and dying out - thank you very much. The less of you there are the more consulting jobs I get on AS400 work.
Exactly. I'm being trained on one where I work ( police dept ), and I can't wait to list that bulletin on my resume.

Instantly adds a few numbers to my asking price. ;)
 
shade91 said:
To the haters who insist that the AS400 is garbage and dying out - thank you very much. The less of you there are the more consulting jobs I get on AS400 work.


Amen to that, if they were dying, the fortune 16 company i work for would NOT be programing for them still.

Oh and i can imagine that backplain issue was a bitch to figure out, only problems i have had were a power supply which was our fault, oops. And a few hard drive, the are by far as stout as you say.
 
shade91 said:
The only thing dying out about them are their admins. They will be around for a very long time. To the haters who insist that the AS400 is garbage and dying out - thank you very much. The less of you there are the more consulting jobs I get on AS400 work.

the post with the most truth in this entire thread
 
ya i work with an E-series machine aswell. actually we have 2 1 to mirror the primary so the jobs or functionality will never go down, except that one time our battery backup went dead :eek: woo hoo for the sleeping grave yard shift guy. got fired 1 hr later
 
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