PASE for Programmers

A few weeks ago, Tony Cairns wrote the blog Technology Moves Fast. PASE Can Help. Tony is back again this week with a follow-up with more information on PASE for programmers.

 

Download AIX Open Source binaries for your IBM i ...

IBM i PASE Option 33 re-distributes many common AIX binaries so you do not have to FTP them from another AIX machine. However, if you are looking for additional PASE/Linux utilities found on many Linux laptops (zip, unzip, gunzip, etc.), check out Young i Professionals (YIPs) instructions for downloading AIX Open Source binaries into PASE.

PASE tends to run 80–90% of the functions of AIX needed to run most popular software (Java, PHP, SAP, etc.), but it is NOT a complete AIX system (if you need a complete AIX system, buy AIX).

Here is a list of what PASE does not support …

• Systems management functions of AIX (smit, etc.). Rather, use the IBM i management features (RSTLICPGM, etc.)

• Performance tools do not work the same as AIX; IBM i has it own set of performance tools.

• “Real time” functions tend not to work the same (REAL CLOCK, etc.)

• Tooling, tooling, tooling, … yep “geek” discussion, we just don’t have it all on IBM i since PASE is not an AIX developer machine.

For ILE/RPG programmers …

With knowledge of “SLIC kernel sharing” - shared memory model (teraspace), shared exception/signal model, etc. - you can use the APIs that PASE provides for both ILE (Qp2CallPase, etc.) and the PASE side (_ILECALL, _PGMCALL, etc.) to interact between PASE and ILE (yes, RPG as well).

• Call a PASE Procedure

• Calling ILE Procedures

• RPG-2-PASE

• The YIPs provide an example RPG program loading a PASE shared library and calling a function (PASE libmy.a → accounts)

• RPG-2-PASE shell utilities

• Example RPG popen utility to call PASE utilities. The featured example calls PASE curl (downloaded open source utility) to get stock quotes from Yahoo REST site.

 

Become a PASE super geek quickly …

The absolute fastest way to become a PASE expert is to start playing around with shells (QCMD, QSH, call qp2term). There is a YIPs wiki page full of examples that you can download and become the biggest PASE geek on the block.

The following gives you an idea of the kinds of information you can find on that wiki page.

There are three shell topics on the YIPs Wiki:

• Part 1 - QSH/QP2TERM (shells) — differences between QCMD, QSH, QP2TERM, shell pipes between environments

• Part 2 - QSH/QP2TERM (parms) — shell parameters across QCMD, QSH, QP2TERM environments

• Part 3 - QSH/QP2TERM (web) — everything learned can instantly be moved to IBM i web

And here are some additional highlights:

• Before you start … IBM i arrives from manufacturing with a default machine QCCSID of 65535 (hex or binary), which is disaster for PASE and ILE interaction. At issue, PASE runs ASCII and ILE runs EBCDIC, therefore interactions require a valid CCSID setting to allow conversion of string content between the two environments (not 65535).

• Shells are about pipes … Shell environment interactions operate using interlocking pipes terminal<pipe>command, command<pipe>command, a very powerful idea forming the basis of all UNIX style scripting languages.

• QSH (ILE sh) - born ILE, runs mostly ILE, taught how/when share command control with PASE sh

• call qp2term (PASE sh) - born AIX, runs mostly PASE sh, taught how/when share command control with QSH

• Conquer IBM i using system utility. Try all PASE/ILE tricks, including output(*).

• Writing your own scripting utilities (PASE/ILE) … example (c, rpg) is often the easiest way to understand, so we will offer an easy command for each environment that demonstrates.

• IBM i GUI? PASE graphics on IBM i

• This section is optional, but I use ssh -X adc@mysystem and the PASE GUI editor nedit every day, so I am including section on native IBM i X graphics to round out your IBM i scripting super geek skills (even super geeks use graphical editors these days).

• PASE sh CGI. Hey, everything you just learned about shells is directly transferable to web environment.

• IBM i Apache HTTP server has been trained to run PASE CGI(s) from directories starting with /QOpenSys.

 

Here are some additional references:

http://www.youngiprofessionals.com/wiki/index.php/PASE/PASENutShell

http://www.youngiprofessionals.com/wiki/index.php/PASE/Shell

http://www.youngiprofessionals.com/wiki/index.php/XMLSERVICE/XMLSERVICE

http://www.youngiprofessionals.com/wiki/index.php/PASE/OpenSourceBinaries

 

 

A Peek at AIX From an “i Guy” (ok, Girl)

I've been working with IBM Systems Director quite a bit lately. Of course my main interests are the latest capabilities for managing IBM i with Systems Director. Because the IBM Systems Director Server does not actually run on IBM i, I've had the opportunity to get some experience within the UNIX world according to AIX.

Maybe I'm not as much of a computer geek as I thought since I find working with AIX more difficult than with i. Sure, I've not worked much with AIX before and my career has been i-centric. Experience and knowledge play a strong part in strengths and difficulties, but there are some things about AIX that I just don't get.

Let me list some of the challenges I've faced and some observations about them.... 

• The command line interface. It seems that we in the i-world are viewed negatively because we love our “green screens” - it's so easy to learn and use! Of course, the expectation today for end-user applications is different, but for administrative purposes, the command line interface is generally much more efficient; in the UNIX world, no one uses a graphical interface for system administration.
  
  Within two weeks of starting my job at IBM, I could figure out almost any command or figure out how to find it. The consistency of the command interface on i is so wonderful! Once you know a few of the command abbreviations, it's pretty easy to figure out what the command names should be or might be.
  
  The AIX command line interface frustrates me to no end.
  
  
• The two graphical user interfaces we use are IBM Systems Director Navigator and System i Navigator. They are used by many admins. AIX also has the IBM Systems Director Console for AIX. I've yet to meet anyone who uses it. The AIX administrative guys want their command lines not a GUI.
  
  
• Command help and prompting is brilliantly executed on i. AIX features dash-this-and-dash-that without consistency and I'm never sure if notation is mandatory or optional. I'd like to keep this observation within our community since AIX people would probably revolt if they knew how good we have it in this area. Also, man pages on AIX?
  
  
• Vi for editing.... And we think SEU is dated??
  
  
• Storage management.
  I'm not very knowledgeable about how storage is allocated and managed on AIX, but things can go wrong very quickly if you don't have sufficient storage allocated to a directory. Not enough storage allocated to /tmp, /var/, or /opt and you'll have problems. But why do I have to even care? There's plenty of storage available to the partition …. I really appreciate how i just takes care of the storage management for you.
  
  
• No job logs!
  ...but there are many log files. ...all over the place! It's so nice to have just a few, standard places to look for messages on i: QSYSOPR, QHST, and job logs. With second-level help on the messages, along with consistent information regarding the time and sender of the message, message logging on i makes diagnostics vastly easier and wastes less time.
  
  

Of course, my experience in the UNIX world is very limited, but the last few months have made me appreciate the ease-of-use and intuitive nature of IBM i.

It's perplexing how i gets a bad rap over it's terminal interface, but on AIX, it's viewed as expected. It's probably even revered, particularly if you are good at it... I don't quite get it.

Guess that's why I'm an “i Guy.”

 

Power Systems Technical University in Copenhagen

This week I've had the opportunity to attend the Power Systems Technical University in Copenhagen. The conference is held in in the Bella Center, with the conference hotel, the Bella Sky Cromwell Hotel, connected to it.

Since this is a Power Systems conference, the agenda covers Power hardware, AIX, IBM i, Linux, Systems Director, virtualization and other topics.

The keynote presentation was led off by Tom Rosamilia. Having heard Tom talk at other conferences, much of the overall message was the same; Tom talked about IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, Watson, the explosion of data and Power System's market share. There was one very interesting tidbit of information that Tom shared with the audience that I'm sure my i readers will love to hear – IBM i had a great 3^rd quarter with double-digit growth. That certainly brought a smile to my face!

At the Power Systems Technical University conferences, you generally find many more attendees that are interested in AIX as opposed to IBM i, and that was also true at this conference, but there was still excellent representation from our i clients. I gave the “IBM i Today, Tomorrow and Beyond” presentation that Steve Will often does and the room was full (and it was on the agenda for a second time and that too was well attended). It's a very busy week for me with 12 presentations. When I give a technical presentation I generally ask my audience what releases they are on. It was enlightening to see that there are fewer and fewer clients on 5.4 and more on more on 6.1 and 7.1.

One final observation I have is regarding the “Power Systems” branding and how that is a very good thing. The entire audience listening to the keynote heard about IBM i's double-digit growth. During some free time when I wasn't presenting, I took the time to attend some non-i sessions. In two of those sessions (one was an IBM Systems Director session, the other “SAN 101”), the speakers talked about considerations for IBM i as well as AIX. With Power, many things are common across all operating systems and it's exciting to hear IBM i talked about in places where in the past the focus was likely only AIX.

 

 

 

Suspend My i

Another IBM announcement day; there were several IBM i-related enhancements, one of which is Suspend/Resume, a feature of PowerVM that was already supported on AIX and Linux and is now available on i.

From the RFA:
PowerVM includes support for an IBM i 7.1 partition to be suspended, and later resumed. Using Suspend/Resume, clients can perform long-term suspension of partitions, which frees server resources used by that partition, and later resume operation of that partition and its applications on the same server.

Why might you be interested in suspending an i partition? There are numerous examples:

•    Free up system resources for other partitions to use.
•    Suspend workloads and applications so that hardware maintenance can be done, resuming the partitions later, thus starting up where they were running and avoiding a full IPL of each partition.
•    Energy savings; use fewer processors when the workloads aren’t needed.
•    Perhaps you have some long-running tests, but you'd like to save energy by not running those tests overnight; you could suspend the work and only run the tests during the day, without losing the work you've already done.


To use Suspend/Resume with i requires the following:

•    IBM i 7.1 with Technology Refresh 2 PTF Group
•    The logical partition must be configured to use all virtual I/O (i.e., the virtual I/O server is required and you must be using external storage)
•    The partition must be managed by an HMC or the newly announced IBM Systems Director Management Console (SDMC)
•    The partition must be configured to allow it to be suspended through the HMC or SDMC
•    The resume of the partition must occur on the same system on which the suspend was done

Control of suspending--and subsequently resuming--an IBM i partition is done through the HMC or SDMC as an interactive procedure. The operating system will validate that it’s in a state that’s acceptable to suspend.

A partition can remain suspended indefinitely. When you resume a partition, its saved state is restored and it will begin to function as it had prior to the suspend. There may be a burst of activity that occurs when a partition is resumed since it will appear to the system that the clock has been moved forward. Functions that are time-interval based may begin running immediately when the partition is resumed, while other functions will run when the next timer interval expires. 

The capability to suspend an IBM i partition is an exciting new enhancement. If you aren’t yet on the 7.1 release, perhaps this new capability (or one of the many other features announced) will provide the incentive to take a good look at 7.1.