• Bullet-Proofing OS/400 User Profiles from Automatic Disablement, Expiration

  April 20, 2005 Hey, Joe

  I liked your article about using the Analyze Profile Activity command (ANZPRFACT) to automatically disable inactive user profiles. I wasn’t aware that you could set up an active profile list by using the DSPACTPRFL and CHGACTPRFL commands. I don’t have any entries in my active profile list, but ANZPRFACT has a bad habit of disabling several of my Q* user profiles. Do you recommend adding the Q* profiles into my active profile list?

  –Rob

  

  Most definitely. That’s what IBM designed the active profile list for: to shield user profiles from ANZPRFACT processing. But remember that there are several Q*

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• Special Files Can Do It All

  April 13, 2005 Ted Holt

  A special file is a file that is a front-end for a program. That is, when an I/O request occurs to the special file, the system calls a program. The ILE RPG Programmer’s Guide refers to this called program as the “user-written routine.” Special files provide a way for RPG to do anything that a program can do.

  

  To tell an RPG program that a file is special file, use the device type SPECIAL in the file description specifications. In the keyword section of the F spec, use the PGMNAME keyword to name the user-written routine that is to be

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• Admin Alert: The Joys and Pains of Automatically Disabling User Profiles

  April 13, 2005 Joe Hertvik

  In previous Admin Alerts, I discussed two ways to activate and deactivate individual user profiles by using OS/400 Activation Entries and OS/400 Expiration Schedule Entries. While these features disable and enable individual profiles, they do nothing to automatically disable any OS/400 user profiles that have been inactive for a set number of days. That’s where OS/400’s Analyze Profile Activity command (ANZPRFACT) comes in, a valuable technique that contains one nasty pitfall.

  

  Used properly, ANZPRFACT automatically disables any user profile that has not been used in a certain number of days. If your security policy called for automatically disabling user

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• Using FTP to Poll for File

  April 6, 2005 Hey, David

  I am moving data between an iSeries system and several Unix systems. I pull the files over manually using FTP and then use the Copy from Import File (CPYFRMIMPF) to copy the records to a database file. After processing is done, I send the files back to the Unix system.

  The biggest “hole” in the process is that there is no automated way to bring over the files from the FTP server onto the iSeries. I would like to have a polling process that would go through a list, check for new files to process, automatically run the FTP GET,

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• Yet Another Way to Build a Tab-Delimited File

  April 6, 2005 Hey, Ted

  Thanks for the tip on creating CSV files with SQL. If the data itself contains commas or double quotes, import programs such as Microsoft Excel may get confused on where fields start and end. I think it’s much safer to use a tab (X’05’) as the delimiter and use the PC file extension “txt”.

  Keep up the great work!

  –Chris

  

  That sounded like a good suggestion to me, so I gave it a whirl, Chris. You were right. I had no trouble opening a tab-delimited file with embedded commas in Microsoft Excel. But that’s not to say I didn’t

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• Admin Alert: Using OS/400 Prestart Jobs for Repetitious Server Processing

  April 6, 2005 Joe Hertvik

  In a previous column, I discussed using OS/400 autostart jobs to run server jobs that handle repetitious processing for system users. With OS/400 being the full-featured operating system that it is, there’s more than one way to skin this particular cat. OS/400 also provides a second and, in some ways, a more effective way to automatically start repetitious server jobs in a subsystem: prestart job entries and prestart jobs.

  

  Like autostart jobs, a prestart job is a batch job that is usually configured to start running when a subsystem begins. But unlike autostart jobs, prestart jobs can easily be

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• Transferring Save Files

  March 30, 2005 Bruce Guetzkow

  The code for this article is available for download.

  In addition to transferring physical file data to and from the Integrated File System (IFS), which I covered a year ago in this newsletter (see “Better Data Transfers”), it is sometimes desirable to transfer data that has been placed into a save file. Copying a save file to the IFS makes it possible to attach data to an email. You can then easily share objects with a colleague or with IBM for aid in problem resolution. I have developed two commands that simplify this task: SAVSAVFIFS (Save Save

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• Is My Job Finished?

  March 30, 2005 Hey, Ted

  From things you have written, I know you understand my need to avoid modifying the packaged software we run. I would like to write a program, to run at night, that will run some in-house programs and then submit some programs from the packaged software to batch. At this point, I need to wait until all the submitted jobs have finished before continuing with some more homegrown programs. How can my overnight program know when the submitted jobs have finished?

  

  –Tim

  Isn’t it amazing the lengths we go to in order to avoid modifying packaged software? I’ve put something together

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• Existence Tests and Left Exception Joins

  March 23, 2005 Dear Colleagues

  SQL has changed a lot since I first used it in 1984, and I can’t think of a single change that hasn’t been for the better. One of the best improvements, to my way of thinking, is the addition of the JOIN clause in SELECT queries.

  

  I have never liked the EXISTS predicate. I find it hard to read. Sometimes it is difficult to make EXISTS yield the results I want. Fortunately, I have found that the LEFT EXCEPTION JOIN makes a good substitute for EXISTS in many cases. The left exception join returns rows from the primary table that

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• Where Did I Come From?

  March 23, 2005 Hey, Ted

  How can I tell which job queue an active batch job was submitted to?

  –Tim

  Do you mean how a human can see that information or how a program can determine it? I’ll show you both ways.

  A human can use the Work with Job (WRKJOB) command to determine which job queue a batch job came from. Take Option 2, Display Job Definition Attributes.

  

  Here’s a second method that you probably won’t need. The job queue name is also in a message in the job log. Display the job log and look for a message that says “Job 123456/SOMEUSER/SOMEJOB submitted”

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