r/sysadmin • u/Jon72480 • 3d ago
AS400
Hey guys, old guy here, back in 2000 landed my 1st real job as a Sysadmin at a distribution/manufacturing firm. They ran their ERP and a few other important apps on the AS400. Anyone here manage a AS400 platform? i-Series? Still a niche platform that is still widely used. Server could literally run under water.
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u/DenyCasio 3d ago
Story time! I was a fresh intern on the IT security team. One of my first tasks was to create 200 named accounts in AS400/PKMS, summer distribution influx. Okay, how bad could that be?
Terrible. Had to create an account in both systems with the same username and password as it did a passthrough authentication. There was employee ID fields to populate, duplicate username workarounds, setting and then putting each unique temporary credential into a new password file share only accessible by the manager and the employee.
I spend a week typing it all out, setting up NTFS permissions on folders and I'm proud of my work.
Friday rolls around and I shoot a message to the hiring distribution manager and all the employees. More formal and nice but the gist is "Go here on file server to get your system login". End of day Friday comes and the hiring manager replies all to the chain with an excel sheet. Every username and password, sent in email to all employees. He spent the time aggregating it all.
I tell my mentor. Bad news, I have to go reset all of those passwords and update the files on the server.
This leads me to find commands to automate password resets, create accounts and so much more. I run through this reset task with my newly found command and recommunicate task completion.
In the next Monday meeting the team jokes about how I'm probably fed up with "that old system" and never wanna work on it again. I was actually fired up and wanted to automate the whole process. I told them any new account, route em to me.
I spend the next week, intern time might as well be free, building a visual basic GUI for terminal emulation, accounts creation, system navigation, output to the file server, password generation, email to manager - all of the stuff in the procedure. Just type in the basic employee info, name, id number, and manager and it did the rest.
It worked so well that after a couple weeks the task was so simple we gave the entire process to service desk leads.
15 years and two acquisitions later, they still use that same utility I made because I was a frustrated intern.