Expert: Concise Systems/Laird Scranton - 12/18/2007

Question
At my work, we collect labor using microsoft abx database access program which is connected to our AS400. When we IPL, we lose the connection and have to do about 6 steps to get it to work again. Is there anyway to your knowledge to pause a connection during an ipl instead of losing it? or, at the pc side, having it look for a signal every minute until the ipl is complete?  thanks

Answer
There is no compelling need to re-IPL an AS/400 each day, even for the sake of a nightly backup - I have clients who rarely re-IPL. Also, the IPL can be scheduled to happen unattended in the middle of the night or on a non-work day to minimize any downtime. Since the IPL shuts down all subsystems on the AS/400, to my knowledge there is no simple way to maintain the server connection. At minimum, the AS/400 start-host-servers command must be run after an IPL to re-establish that connection.

- Laird