AS/400 Information Center goes Interactive
by Garrett Winn (garrettwinn@hotmail.com)

For V4R5, the AS/400 Information Center (http://www.as400.ibm.com/infocenter) has added several new advisors to complement the information that is already there. Advisors are a form of interactive help. The advisor asks you a series of questions and then  makes a recommendation or points you to where you can get more information.

The AS/400 Security Advisor in Technical Studio (http://www.as400.ibm.com/tstudio/SECURE/index_av.htm) is an example of an advisor that has been around for a little while. The Security Advisor will generate a list of recommendations that you can use as a starting point for your security policies, based on the answers you give.

For V4R5, advisors are also available in the AS/400 Information Center for the following tasks:

TCP/IP subnet calculator: This advisor helps you by calculating new subnets of IP addresses for Class A, Class B, and Class C network addresses. You must know your network address before using this advisor. It can only subnet network addresses into equally sized subnets.

All that you need to do is enter your network address and select the number of subnets you want. The advisor then calculates values for each subnet, including the subnet mask and broadcast addresses. The advisor is very easy to use and saves you the pain of figuring out the addresses yourself. It also makes it very easy to go back and try out several different possibilities to see which one you really want.

VPN planning: When you provide this advisor with information about your existing corporate network, the advisor suggests what type of Virtual Private Network (VPN) you should create for your business needs and what parameters are required to configure it. This advisor covers the most basic network configurations, so those with complex or unusual configurations should look for help in the VPN documentation. Otherwise, this advisor is a good starting point for configuring your VPN connection.

After answering five to eight questions (the number depends on your configuration) about the local and remote networks, IP addresses, and security, the advisor provides you with a customized worksheet that you can use to configure the VPN connection. The worksheet provides you with step-by-step instructions to guide you through the configuration process. This advisor takes a complex planning process, cuts through the "fat", and delivers a powerful, timesaving tool.

Logical partition planning: The advisor will ask you a series of questions, and then create the LPAR Hardware Planning Work Sheet for you. This worksheet will help you find out what hardware resources you need to be able to create logical partitions on your AS/400. Your marketing representative or business partner can then use this information to configure the system you need.

The advisor walks you through the process of deciding what hardware you want in each partition. The process can take a long time (from fifteen minutes to several hours depending on the configuration), so be sure to set aside a lot of time to get through it. Although it is easy to go back and forward through the advisor, there is no useful way to jump around and make changes randomly. Look for an update to this advisor later this year that will be easier to use and that will be more compatible with the Configuration Planning Work Sheet currently available on the LPAR web site (http://www.as400.ibm.com/lpar). Look for an article in August's issue about that work sheet.

This advisor is meant to help you complete the first section of the Configuration Planning Work Sheet. The advisor will prove to be very useful for those who want to get a rough idea of the hardware resource requirements needed for their business case. It is not useful, at least at this point, for validating the hardware and the configuration. That job still belongs with the business partner or marketing representative, IBM Technology Solutions Center, and the Configurator tool.

Logical partition troubleshooting: This advisor points you in the right direction for error messages and system reference codes (SRCs) that relate to logical partitions. Although this advisor only supports messages and SRCs directly related to problems caused by the logical partitioning code or requirements, you can narrow down your problem by going here first (if it is not found, then it is probably not related to problems with your logical partitions).

For this advisor, you can either enter the error message or SRC directly, or browse through a list of all the messages or SRCs. One helpful feature for error messages is that you only have to enter the first word or two of the message and the advisor will present you with a list of the possible complete error messages to choose from. You may or may not need to answer a couple additional questions (this would depend on what you entered), and then the advisor can potentially provide you with possible causes, solutions, analysis procedures, and where to go for more information. Solutions are only given for problems that you should be able to resolve on your own. Problems requiring the assistance of your next level of service clearly state that fact and may give you instructions on what information to give to your service provider.

How to Find Them:
You access these advisors from the main navigation frame of the Information Center, under the heading "Advisors". Also, you will find links to each advisor from within the appropriate topic in the rest of the Information Center. For example, the Logical partition troubleshooting advisor is also available from the "Troubleshooting logical partitions" section.

This is only the beginning for interactive information in the AS/400 Information Center. Many more advisors will be coming in the years ahead.

If you have suggestions for possible advisors (or comments on the current advisors), the Information Center staff would love to hear from you. You can send an e-mail message with your ideas and/or comments to rchinfoc@us.ibm.com.