s/36ee
goo...@miamicomputer.com
M36's) over to S/36EE in os/400 on a brand new power i.
We got the machine in and set up the first week of July and we moved
the one machine which had 2 M36's running on it plus a bunch of files
in os/400 side to the new box.
About 8000 programs, 4000 procs, and maybe 100 dfu's. We took last
week and moved all the libraries, compiled all the programs and then
last saturday, moved all the files and started off on saturday of
being on the new box.
For years I heard all sorts of "horror stories" of S/36EE, mostly it
was so slow and that so many changes have to be made, etc.
We had simply ran out of disk space in the 2 M36's partitions, and had
programs that were teetering at 64K (and had lots of call's in them
because we had previously did the call/parm to cut K), and we were out
of workstation id's.
Monday was a fun day with the whole plant fired up and there were lots
of little things. The biggest thing was some undocumented "issues"
with ETU/400 but once we knew what they were, well...
In all honesty, S/36EE nearly mixes the best of both worlds. And this
is a i520 M25 which runs at 4300 cpw and it is fast. To give you an
example, we had one job that took 12 minutes on the 170, it took 23
seconds on the new box. Compiles, I can actually compile 800 programs
faster than I can compile a few single ones on the old machine. Well
for example, one used to take 4 minutes and 4 seconds, ran in less
than 2 seconds.
While this is really only the start of day 3, and the fact that none
of here had really any prior os/400 knowledge except for the little
bit we monkeyed with on the guest m36 machines, it has went pretty
good.
It found a bug in a program that had been running since 1988, and the
job log actually pointed to the exact line of code. Yes there is no
history but with the job log and saving it in an output queue, it is
not bad.
The machine does not natively support twinax, and yes one can install
a controller to do this, we were about 90% ethernet anyhow and so we
went the rest of the way. I use IO Corp print servers and it makes it
pretty easy.
So for those of you who are still on a s/36 or adv/36 or M36, and have
thought about os/400 and didn't want to jump to native day 1 but
thought that S/36EE would be so different, think again.
I did have a few assembler subroutines in a few programs and so of
course I had to take care of that. Basically 2 main ones, read the
cursor position and open/close print files. The first can be done via
the INFDS looking at 2 1 byte fields and a few program changes were
made to the other ones.
Ace
years. In that case I will not have to convert the softwarepackage that I
wrote during the last 15 years on S/36 and AS/400 in S/36EE mode.
Cheers,
Peter