Virtual Terminal Emulator AS400

[Ellie]

First off I am new here and if this is not in the right area please feel free to suggest correction.

OK so here is the situation. The company I work for had used AS400 for a longtime to provide us with technical information and breakdowns of
our previously built units. Mid to heavy industrial technology, so it contained all the previous BOM's (bill of materials).

Anyway our problem is that certain people in our organization failed to listen to those who used it most frequently and have now shut down access to
the other program , our IT dept which is large had said well we have info on other systems blah blah you will be fine. Guess what day 1 was Thursday and
its a nightmare we cannot get what we need.   

So to cut a long story short the disks with the information on them are being returned to us Monday. Does anyone know if there is a way we can transfer this information to a single desktop then
access it either via an emulator or windows/dos environment either or that machine or network to our terminal group. I am sorry i am not a tech expert and I hope I have explained the situation enough for someone to suggest a solution.

Thank you in anticipation of your suggestions  or a FIX

Ellie

[DaveLembke]

A nightmare for sure that they would pull the plug on the system with inability to get it back up and running until maybe Monday when disks with the info are returned.

Just saying that a mess up this bad for companies I worked for in the past = termination of employment for those who carried out directly such a careless act without a Plan B to go back to how it was when Plan A is a failure.

Im at a loss as to how you will get by until the disks with the data are returned.

I use to work with a BOM system in the late 1990s for Rockwell Automation and it was a setup with VT Terminals and printing out a BOM on dot matrix printer for manufacturing of PCBs and assemblies. The system we had had to be run on that specific system. In a pinch if a terminal was dead I suppose you could hyperterm serial if a terminal was dead, but from what I'm reading on your problem, it sounds like they pulled the plug on the system and shipped it off without confirming that the replacement system configuration would work.   

Hopefully your not part of their IT department because in IT mistakes like this are severe enough for termination of employment. I have seen people fired for lesser acts of not using their brains in IT     Not being able to print out BOMs puts manufacturing at a stand still and costs A LOT. It was bad enough when our wave solder machine went down and manufacturing was able to assemble PCB's but unable to wave solder them. In desperation some boards were hand soldered for all connections and then sent to the PCB wash to remove flux then dried in a dryer of all moisture, and then powered in a room at 120F and then tested afterwards to make sure they passed stress test and then shipped.

[Ellie]

No I am not in IT there lol. I was one of the people who asked them not to do this....

[strollin]

Since we do not know what format the BOMs are stored in, there is no way we could answer the question as to whether they will be recoverable from the disks themselves.  My guess would be that they won't be recoverable without the disks being re-installed in the AS400.

[Ellie]

Ok great point there. I will check Monday to see if I can get this information. Hopefully there is some way  we can find a software than can emulate AS400 or read / make it accessible in Windows. It is just incomprehensible how shortsighted the people involved in this process have been.

[DaveLembke]

Question I have is.... why is the AS400 system unavailable to have the disks loaded back into it and run it as it was? Hopefully the IT department didnt drop kick it off the loading dock into the parking lot or destroy the AS400 in some other brainless method.  Sorry if this might be coming across as kind of harsh, but I'm shaking my head at this one holding back what could be said for such stupidity.

I think I might be kind of harsh with this one because it reminds me of what I was replaced with at my prior career for a small food store chain that decided that $18 per hour for a System Admin that did all and was on call 24/7/365 including while on vacation should be forced to a salary reduction of $13 per hour at the wake of the 2008 economy collapse. I left on my own terms, but my boss was fired and both of us kept the place going. They hired an ex billion dollar store chain guru who in his prime wisdom believed that it was best to shed the 2 IT buys who kept everything running smoothly for 7 sites over 300 users and 150 workstations and replace us with cheaper employment ( entry level IT individuals fresh out of a 2 year school ) and they were running the IT department very much the same as what you have to deal with. I was called to work as an outside contractor for them to fix the mess they created since I knew all the systems inside and out. I declined to assist because its a mess that they created for themselves and they should work it out. It came down to many idiots bringing systems offline during prime operating times as well as them hiring a manager of IT who had issues and was hiring and firing like crazy because other than managing people he had no clue about IT so they made him look bad and he would fire them. He never successfully hired any peons below him to cover the fact that he was a clueless manager and he was finally fired after destroying the accounting database. They finally contracted it out to a small computer store to support them as well as got a contract with RCR to support their POS system and right now I think they are actually working ok, but friends who I am in contact with who still work there miss me and my boss scott. Last I heard the reduction they had planned as lowering my salary or removal of me + removal of my boss cost them about $150,000 in losses due to registers down so they werent able to sell food to customers as well as the manager they hire that was clueless bought a bunch of IT hardware and was unsuccessful at implementing it all.

Before leaving on my own, the new clueless manager tried to get me on insubordination because I called him out privately in his office on a very stupid plan he had and I said I would seriously do it this other way instead. On the day I gave my notice he had drafted up an insubordination letter that he wanted me to sign to. I refused to sign that. Thinks maybe thats being insubordinate too to refuse to sign.  He did it his way and it crashed and burned. 

Glad your not in the IT department. 

[Ellie]

Well it was supposedly being uploaded to a database ...however this is not available for minimum 4 weeks....ok i know we all LOL'd   when he heard that but its not really funny on a day to day basis....plus my point is how do you know what you are proposing works if you say it wont be finished if it ever is ... for at least 4 weeks

[strollin]

I was afraid that would be the case.  You will need the disks installed back in the AS400 and it will need to be booted in order to run the database software in order to retrieve the BOMs from the database.

[patio]

Kinda silly to be going on about it since she has zero control over what happened...or what's gonna happen...

[patio]

Topic Closed upon request...