RE: Where are all of the /400's going. -- MIDRANGE-L

> > Except that its a "PC". And probably the "NT guy" is looking after it.
>
>If you're worried about ownership, step up and take ownership yourself.
>Describe it as a peripheral for the AS/400, and say you'll tkae care of it.
>It's not that hard, and you'll be personally responsible for saving the
>company money.

Agreed absolutely. Ownership is the key in my view.

> > Because you are giving away control of a piece of the business and IT that
> > you shouldn't give away. Before long the PC guy or the web guy is in with
> > the marketing manager or the CEO telling them how if they added IIS,
> > Apache, Perl, PHP, Zope or whatever turns his particular wheel that they
> > could serve dynamic data such as up-to-date price lists instead of just
> > static pages.
>
>This is a political discussion rather than a technical one.  Evidently
>you've had bad experiences with "PC guys" in the past, so you want
>everything on your AS/400 where you have control.  Obviously, there can be
>no technical argument against that position.

Agreed PC guys in my experience tend not to be "professional", but I'm
probably old and bigoted :). Windows is not a technical choice, it is a
philosophical choice. In many cases, although it need not be so, Unix is too.

It's not so much a case of having control as of feeling comfortable when I
make promises.

There is also an issue that the less PCs you have (ignoring desktops) the
less high end skills you need. There are some economic choices in how good
a PC guy you need to support a server versus desktops.

> > By and large I don't disagree with what you say Joe, in particular how
> > difficult the economics are to justify, but I see this as retaining a
> > strategic service. It is far easier to start configuring your AS/400 HTTP
> > server and the other bits and pieces using static pages to understand how
> > to do web serving, than it is to argue the case for JSP's or websphere or
> > whatever once the webserving is being done from the little box in the
> > corner (or however many the NT guys has managed to grow it into.
>
>Web serving can be done - indeed often SHOULD be done - from more than one
>platform within your organization.  But since you believe backing up a
>single PC is beyond the capabilities of your IT staff, I doubt that
>supporting a second HTTP server is going to fly.
>
>
> > Evan Don't-give-it-away-coz-you-won't-get-it-back Harris
>
>This being your position, no technical argument can have merit and will
>simply further clog the bandwidth.  I shall cease and desist.

Fair enough Joe, but initially you argued that it shouldn't be done from a
security/data separation point of view (which I believe is a flawed
argument) then you made it an economic argument, which has a great deal
more validity, even though it is not a "technical argument" and somewhat
dependent on how you see things.

I would guess from your comments regarding ownership and doing it myself
(which is exactly what I was arguing - platform is less relevent in this
sense) that essentially we agree anyway. I want to own the architecture and
delivery (and the budget !) - the how is not so important.

Regards
Evan Harris