You are currently browsing Andy Piper's articles.
The SupportPacs system continues to expand – the most recent addition is the new WebSphere Business Process Management SupportPacs page.
Most of the SupportPacs on this page are related to WebSphere Business Modeler and WebSphere Business Monitor. However, there’s also a useful plugin for WebSphere Integration Developer that provides a wizard to help developers to use the MQ-CICS bridge. It also provides assistance with handling the MQCIH header required by the bridge. Worth a look if you need to call a CICS program across the bridge from a mediation or business process.
In the previous post, we took a brief look at some of the things we can learn from the queue manager using the DISPLAY command in runmqsc. It turns out that there is a lot of information available. So, what if we want to filter the results to see something more specific?
I first learned MQ quite a few years ago, back in the days of MQSeries version 5.1. The instructor on my MQ course told us that the most useful thing we could learn for administering MQ would be the command interface – the runmqsc program. Why? Simple: it is consistent between platforms[1]; it is scriptable; and it is extremely powerful, exposing everything you might want to know about how your queue manager is running.
In version 6 of WebSphere MQ, the command program has been considerably enhanced. If you’ve been used to the range of commands available in WebSphere MQ 5.3 or earlier, it is worth looking again the functions that are available. If you are new to the product, it is also worth knowing how to get the most from runmqsc.
This post is not going to be a full tutorial on using runmqsc. I just wanted to highlight some of the things that are possible in WMQ v6. In fact, I’m just going to focus on what we can learn using the DISPLAY command – some “did you know?”-style tips. For full reference information, check out the Infocenter.
It may be useful to be aware that there are some restrictions when adding new queue managers to MQ Explorer. I recently had a case where a customer could not enter the hostname into the dialog. It turned out that the hostname had an underscore (_) character in it. The entry field in MQ Explorer prevents the user from entering this character.
This restriction makes sense. As per several RFCs (RFC952, RFC1035, RFC1178) and the Wikipedia entry on hostnames, underscores_are_not_valid characters in hostnames.
… hostname labels can only be made up of the ASCII letters ‘a’ through ‘z’ (case-insensitive), the digits ‘0′ through ‘9′, and the hyphen. Labels can not start nor end with a hyphen. Special characters other than the hyphen (and the dot between labels) are not allowed, although they are sometimes used anyway. Underscore characters are commonly used by Windows systems but according to RFC 952 they are not allowed…
A solution could be to reference the IP address of the queue manager in question, or possibly to alias the hostname in the hosts file so that it does not contain underscores. Note that I have not tested the latter solution, but it should work.
