Hate to ruin the party, but I just phoned tech support and the last memo in late december 2004 is 'no'. Why? I guess so they can sell more Linux boxes, so that they can pimp the LPAR technology harder, etc.

see also

[link|http://www-912.ibm.com/s_dir/slkbase.NSF/0/a8772f826a01b79c86256e320057b259?OpenDocument|http://www-912.ibm.c...b259?OpenDocument]

Having said that I also asked about porting openSSH - answer thus far is that it's not supported, and you have to port opnSSL first or you don't have a prayer.

AT my shop things took some interesting twists-

first we took a java-based ssh suite from sourceforge.net, and had one of the pet java guys build it from source. It compiled okay, but hung seemingly inxplicably on the send. This was because we had no SSH key, and a window-type method was used to get a passphrase. USELESS for batch! So we instead replaced that method with one that passed back a hard coded password. It worked, but we had to recode every 3 months. Better solutions could have been done, but the pet java guy got pulled. I was thinking passing the password as a parm or maybe using database to store, or even genning the key elsewhere and storing it in the IFS. These required more hours than anyone wanted to commit.

A commercial vendor offered some AS400 SSH port, but when I contacted them, they said they'd withdrawn that as too difficult. Last I heard, they're offering again.

Instead I had ops configure a tiny Linux partition (free for us, LPAR capability is a hardware upgrade we got for some other reason), NFS-mounted a subtree of the IFS, and used RUNRMTCMD to run sftp scripts from the partition, sending data from beneath the mount point.

It works 80 - 90 % of the time, but...

Sometimes the Linux partition hangs, ie stops responding (although sometimes it pings). Obvious solution is to retry which sometimes works, but it is not optimal.

I am convinced the sourceforge solution is the best way to go, BUT the effort must be made to isolate the methods/classes that do GUI for some strange reason (sftp client, for example, runs a gui to do the actual send, just so ou can see a progress bar - oh brother) and replace with status messages, or display files if absolutely neccessary (for automation, I don't think so). Ther fact that an SSH key can be stored on NFS-mounted AS/400 storage and be used succesfulyl tells me it will probably work with the ported scenario.

Perhaps this is something we can do as a team...

In the meantime, I am in the process of getting java-certified on my own, come the time (call it 6 months), and as lead AS/400 developer in dundee, I'm not going to stop myself using Java on the I-series ;)...

So it is possible, it dfoes not have to be painful, it will come.

Here is java app in question:

[link|http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsch/|http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsch/]

Looks like it's been upgraded since I tried it 2 years ago. I reckon a team of 4 chipping away for 4 months if that could pull it off if we did it outside the companies we work for. It would require a AS/400 (free time share is out there I hear) and a Linux box to test against. Plus some SSH network types to do the key synching.

What say you people?

Well, I hope you're correct.

The support guy said someone would be calling me back, even after the policy statement. Maybe a flag on the question?

Just for fun though, I think I'm going to look at the other thing in my wee hours.

Ta for the update