One of the most basic areas any good AS/400, iSeries or IBM i administrator needs to be familiar with are the system values. These values define various ways in which your system functions and can greatly have an impact of ease of administration and performance. Let’s examine three common values you should be familiar with on your IBM system.

First up on the list is the controlling subsystem QCTLSBS. This value controls how the system is setup to divvy up the jobs, either broadly using one primary subsystem or in a more granular fashion using many subsystems. Out of the box the operating system is setup to use the QBASE option which dumps all jobs under one subsystem.

Going with the default controlling subsystem makes it easy for administration but it is difficult to maintain system performance and job control because all of the jobs get dumped into one subsystem. In most all cases you will want to set the controlling subsystem up as QBATCH. This way the interactive and regular batch jobs will be separated into there own subsystems of QINTER and QBATCH where you can effectively control and monitor performance.

One setting that can have a major impact on security and performance is the security audit level values QAUDLVL and QAUDLVL2. Actually QAUDLVL and it’s sister value QAUDLVL2 work in conjunction with turning on security auditing using the QAUDCTL value. By default the system does not have any of these security auditing levels turned on, but for various reasons and just plain good practice you will probably want to do some level of security auditing and journals. If you have to comply with SarbOx then turning security on full bore will be mandatory.

Security auditing logs what is done on the system right from object creation and access to changes and everything in between. Getting extremely granular with security auditing can create volumes of audit journals. Depending on how your system is used all of the logging can begin to bog it down and make it cumbersome to find a particular security event. So use the security auditing system values wisely.

Finally if your using a Twinax network to connect printers and terminals to your system then you will want to look at the auto configure value QAUTOCFG. This system value tells the operating system to automatically create the device descriptions with the proper configuration and ready devices that you connect to the twinax network and other devices like tape drives.

But this setting is both a blessing and a curse. Letting the system automatically create device descriptions can make your life easier but the price for this comes when you move devices around and re-attach them to the system. The problem is that when they are brought back online the system recognizes them as a new device then they get renamed. So for example PRT01 is then renamed as PRT02 or your tape device becomes TAP02 and so on. When this happens you then have to go back and modify the device descriptions manually to get things named properly or just deal with the new device names.

Author Bio: John Andersen is an IT manager currently living in California. Check out his site at www.midrangejumpstart.com for more tips, tricks and techniques you can use on your AS/400, iSeries and IBM i platform.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: as400,iseries,IBM i