Admin/4i Overview

Admin/4i is a comprehensive system administration tool, providing Menus, Backups, Scheduler Management and Network Management, designed and written specifically for the IBM i Server, (Formerly AS/400, iSeries).  Admin/4i supports both the S36 environment and IBM i native seamlessly.

Admin/4i is an easy to use high level interface between the IBM i Operating System, end-users, and application programs.  What this means is that the IT Administration staff can concentrate on the productive activities such as systems development and application maintenance – Admin/4i replaces the need to develop management systems for the Menu allocation, User Security, Backups and Scheduler control.

THE MENU MANAGEMENT COMPONENT

The Menu Management component of Admin/4i provides for:

• the establishment and structuring of Menus for your in-house developed applications or purchased package solutions;
• the establishment and allocation of Security classes for End-users, i.e. Security Officer, Programmer, System Operator, and User;
• the duplication in-part or total of your menu and security structure to create a “Development test area”; and,
• the allocation of responsibility for menu item allocation and security access control to individual system or application managers. These may be IT Managers or trained end users.

The above functions are provided in an easy to use structure with full on-line screen help text.

THE BACKUPS COMPONENT

The Backups component of Admin/4i provides an easy means to backup the data on your system while providing logging of all objects saved and automatic allocation of tapes to save operations.  Provision is made for saving to either tape or disk, (save files), and utilising IBM supplied save types, (*SAVSYS, *NONSYS, *IBM, …).

The Backups component provides for:

• saving to tape or disk;
• save Libraries, Objects, Changed objects, Document library objects, Menu application libraries, and Generic library supported;
• saves controlled by Cycle Descriptions;
• IBM save types supported;
• automatic tape allocation;
• full logging of saved information;
• simple restore function for object, library, dlo, … ;

THE SCHEDULER COMPONENT

The Scheduler component of Admin/4i provides for the management of Batch Processing. This includes application batch jobs and system housekeeping functions. The Scheduler component provides the ability to schedule a job to run at a pre-determined date and time, on a given day of the week/month/year, or on the same relative time and day of the week/month/year (e.g. 1st day of each month). The Scheduler program continually monitors the system time and at pre-determined intervals determines whether the jobs are to be submitted.

Essentially, there are two types of jobs that can be submitted, these are:

• *PERM, the scheduler job is a permanent job and will be processed at the scheduled time and occurance(s) specified; and,
• *TEMP, the scheduler job is a temporary job and will be removed from the list of scheduled jobs after normal completion.

In addition, a special job name of *SYSTEM is allowed and all jobs that have a scheduled time of   000000  are submitted automatically
at the specified submit time for this system job.

THE IMPORT/EXPORT COMPONENT

The Import/Export component of Admin/4i provides for the management of multiple systems, (i.e. Multiple machines, Machines with multiple partitions or Multiple environments on a single machine).  This facility enables menu items maintained on one system to be exported to one or more other systems and automatically imported and made available on the receiving system(s).  This facility enables menu’s to be maintained at a central site and exported, rather than having to maintain menu’s at each site.