Manage work

As a system operator or administrator, one of your tasks is to keep your server running smoothly. This means you monitor, manage, and ensure that your jobs, job queues, subsystems, memory pools, job logs, and output queues function properly.

The topics in this section give you information about the different types of daily work management tasks as well as other tasks you might need to perform on your iSeries™ server. Each subtopic explains why it is important to do these tasks, as well as how to complete them.

• Change the IPL start-up program
  Create a startup program that will change the system resources, and the resources and attributes assigned to them, that are started during an IPL. Typically, subsystems, writers, and the Operational Assistant are launched by this program.
• Call a special IPL recovery program
  To call a special recovery program for situations when the IPL senses that the previous system ending was abnormal, you can add an autostart job entry to the subsystem description for the controlling subsystem.
• Monitor system activity
  Monitoring system activity is one of the many important tasks in the day of an administrator. Monitoring the flow of work through the system is only a piece of the information that should be monitored on a daily basis. You can accomplish this in a variety of ways, such as using iSeries Navigator and iSeries Navigator Management Central.
• Manage jobs
  As any work management administrator knows, managing jobs is more than placing jobs on hold and moving jobs from job queue to job queue. This topic discusses the most common job management tasks as well as some of the more involved tasks that can help improve your system's performance.
• Manage job scheduling
  You can schedule a job to run using the Advanced Job Scheduler, by using the iSeries Navigator Job Properties window, or by changing the job schedule entry via the character-based interface.
• Manage subsystems
  Because jobs run in subsystems, you might need to monitor subsystem activity for potential problems that can affect a job's ability to run.
• Manage memory pools
  Making sure that jobs get enough memory to complete efficiently is important. If too much memory is given to subsystem A and not enough to subsystem B, jobs in subsystem B might begin to run poorly. The following information describes the various tasks that are involved in managing memory pools.
• Manage job queues
  As you manage the work on your system, you might find it necessary to manipulate jobs that are waiting in a job queue. Perhaps someone needs a job run immediately and the job is sitting in a queue at a low priority. Or maybe you need to perform some maintenance on a subsystem and want to move all of the jobs to a queue that is not associated with that particular subsystem.
• Manage output queues
  Output queues help you manage printer output created when a job ends. It is important to understand how to effectively maintain your output queues so that your printed output processes smoothly.
• Manage job logs
  Most jobs on your iSeries have a job log associated with it. Job logs tell you many different things such as when the job starts, when the job ends, what commands are running, failure notices and error messages. This information gives you a good idea of how the job cycle is running.
• Manage job accounting
  The job accounting function is not active by default. It requires a few initial steps to set it up. The following information describes how to set up job accounting and perform some of the most common tasks associated with job accounting.