We all know and use TCP/IP servers. Many of these servers are set up to start when TCP/IP is started and all servers have the ability for this configuration value to be changed.
The “traditional” TCP/IP servers—those which had been part of the TC1 product for may releases—have an “attributes” command (e.g., Change Telnet Attributes (CHGTELNA), CHGFTPA, CHGSMTPA, etc.) as well as an option (20) under Configure TCP/IP (CFGTCP) to Configure TCP/IP applications. One of the parameters you can configure is “autostart servers,” which specifies whether the TCP/IP server should be automatically started when TCP/IP is started.
You will discover, however, that not all servers have this command interface; in fact, there are many TCP Servers that are not part of the TC1 product that do not have the “traditional” command interfaces.
For these TCP servers, how do you set up servers to automatically start? There may be various ways to do this, but the simple answer is that it’s done via the Navigator for i graphical user interface.
The ability to control TCP Servers through the GUI is divided into two main categories—TCP/IP Servers and User Defined Servers. These servers are found within the Network task, as the screen capture below shows.
When you take the option to display TCP/IP Servers, you will see the complete list of TCP Servers, their status (started or stopped) and a basic description of the server.
The secret for setting the attribute for automatically starting the server jobs is under the properties option for the server. In my example, I’ve navigated to the User Defined Servers and am showing how to display the properties for the IBM SLP Server.
The properties provides a checkbox you can toggle on or off to specify whether that server is one that should be started when TCP/IP is started. Depending upon the server, there may be additional options that you can configure. The following screen capture is an example of the properties you have for the user-defined IBM SLP Server.
You can also view the TCP/IP servers that are configured to automatically start by navigating to Network → All Tasks → TCP/IP Configuration Properties, as the following screen capture shows:
Click on the Servers to Start tab, and you can see a list of the server autostart properties in one table, as the following screenshot shows:
In case you weren’t aware of it, the Start TCP Server (STRTCPSVR) command has an option, *AUTOSTART, for the Server parameter. This option allows you to start all of the servers that have their “Start when TCP/IP is started” property or “autostart servers” attribute set on.
The Server Table in the Knowledge Center documents all of the Server jobs, and the column Shipped default value for Autostart parameter documents the default value for whether a server is automatically started when TCP/IP is started.
Some time ago, I wrote about how you can Identify Your Server Jobs and mentioned in that article how you can create your own custom server, which are the User Defined Servers in the GUI.
This blog post was edited for currency on February 21, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.