April 2009 Q&A

What levels of the System i OS does Help/Systems support?
On April 30, 2009, IBM drops support for i5/OS V5R3.

Help/Systems will drop support on i5/OS V5R3 on May 30, 2009. We will continue to answer your questions about our software on this release. But, we cannot fix software for this release after that date.

We urge you to update your operating system levels if your systems are not on V5R4 or higher—the only supported releases after May 30.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact Help/Systems technical support at 952-933-0609.

How can I include the System i job name, user name, and job number with a pager message sent from Robot/CONSOLE (via Robot/ALERT)?
You can make a global change for all messages escalated to Robot/ALERT from Robot/CONSOLE. To do this, just change the data area RBC084DA to 1. This change lets you send the unique job name to the pager. The command looks like this:

CHGDTAARA DTAARA(RBTCONLIB/RBC084DA (1 1)) VALUE('1')

I have Robot/ALERT and I wrote a CL program to process the reply from a response program. I defined the variable for the reply as 160A as recommended. Using the DMPCLPGM command, I see that the value passed is being truncated to 40 bytes. Is this a known limitation?
First, make sure you are running Robot/ALERT R05M47 (or higher). This modification level removed the 40-character limit on response lengths. After updating Robot/ALERT, you may still encounter length limitations imposed by either e-mail clients or SNPP providers. For example, many e-mail clients insert a carriage return (or line feed) every 76 characters. Robot/ALERT interprets this as the end of a reply. If you need additional help with response programs, contact Help/Systems Technical Support.