IBM i Access Client Solutions

Hi all,

on one of the the COMMON Europe conference, multiple people have mentioned the ability to use your PC as a proxy for an IBM i internet access, when your IBM i system works in some kind of a restricted environment. I'd found it useful for a "direct" check/upload of the PTFs to the system and to make a good use of the QMGToolset functions.

However there is very little-to-no documentation on how exactly should this setup work, besides an open source management related stuff, which I'm not interested in at the moment. I was able to find out that laptop<>internet uses HTTPS and laptop<>IBM i uses SSH.

I'm able to register the QIBM_ACS_HTTP_PROXY function usage for my profile and I can open the "proxy GUI" using the acsbundle.jar package. It tells me to pass the http_proxy and https_proxy variables to an ssh terminal along with the export commands. So I open a putty session to the IBM i system, pass on the parameters, but... 

But I am totally lost what exactly should I do next? :) As the QMGTOOLs functions, when used from 5250 Emulator window, still report the Public IBM site as unreachable...

Anyone made this feature working for such purposes? Thanks!

Dear Michal 

I did a Google search with "ibm i proxy server" and found how to set this up here : Using HTTP Proxy Support for IBM i at https://www.zend.com/blog/using-http-proxy-support-ibm-i       

I also found how to set up Windows 11 client as a proxy server here if this can be another alternative: Use a proxy server in Windows at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-a-proxy-server-in-windows-03096c53-0554-4ffe-b6ab-8b1deee8dae1#ID0EFD=Windows_11      

Hi all,

on one of the the COMMON Europe conference, multiple people have mentioned the ability to use your PC as a proxy for an IBM i internet access, when your IBM i system works in some kind of a restricted environment. I'd found it useful for a "direct" check/upload of the PTFs to the system and to make a good use of the QMGToolset functions.

However there is very little-to-no documentation on how exactly should this setup work, besides an open source management related stuff, which I'm not interested in at the moment. I was able to find out that laptop<>internet uses HTTPS and laptop<>IBM i uses SSH.

I'm able to register the QIBM_ACS_HTTP_PROXY function usage for my profile and I can open the "proxy GUI" using the acsbundle.jar package. It tells me to pass the http_proxy and https_proxy variables to an ssh terminal along with the export commands. So I open a putty session to the IBM i system, pass on the parameters, but... 

But I am totally lost what exactly should I do next? :) As the QMGTOOLs functions, when used from 5250 Emulator window, still report the Public IBM site as unreachable...

Anyone made this feature working for such purposes? Thanks!

Hi all,

on one of the the COMMON Europe conference, multiple people have mentioned the ability to use your PC as a proxy for an IBM i internet access, when your IBM i system works in some kind of a restricted environment. I'd found it useful for a "direct" check/upload of the PTFs to the system and to make a good use of the QMGToolset functions.

However there is very little-to-no documentation on how exactly should this setup work, besides an open source management related stuff, which I'm not interested in at the moment. I was able to find out that laptop<>internet uses HTTPS and laptop<>IBM i uses SSH.

I'm able to register the QIBM_ACS_HTTP_PROXY function usage for my profile and I can open the "proxy GUI" using the acsbundle.jar package. It tells me to pass the http_proxy and https_proxy variables to an ssh terminal along with the export commands. So I open a putty session to the IBM i system, pass on the parameters, but... 

But I am totally lost what exactly should I do next? :) As the QMGTOOLs functions, when used from 5250 Emulator window, still report the Public IBM site as unreachable...

Anyone made this feature working for such purposes? Thanks!

Hello Michal (I hope everything is running fine for you!)

I never used it and am no more in a situation to do so.

But, when thinking loud, if ACS proxy runs like a standard proxy, it should start a tcp listener on your PC on a port that you have to identify (standard proxy port is 8080). Therefore you can maybe use CHGSRVCFG command to specify a proxy in order to download PTFs. Check out https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.5?topic=ssw_ibm_i_75/cl/chgsrvcfg.html#CHGSRVCFG.PROXY with the IP of your PC. Regarding QMGTOOLS, sorry but I have no idea how to set this proxy option.

Hi all,

on one of the the COMMON Europe conference, multiple people have mentioned the ability to use your PC as a proxy for an IBM i internet access, when your IBM i system works in some kind of a restricted environment. I'd found it useful for a "direct" check/upload of the PTFs to the system and to make a good use of the QMGToolset functions.

However there is very little-to-no documentation on how exactly should this setup work, besides an open source management related stuff, which I'm not interested in at the moment. I was able to find out that laptop<>internet uses HTTPS and laptop<>IBM i uses SSH.

I'm able to register the QIBM_ACS_HTTP_PROXY function usage for my profile and I can open the "proxy GUI" using the acsbundle.jar package. It tells me to pass the http_proxy and https_proxy variables to an ssh terminal along with the export commands. So I open a putty session to the IBM i system, pass on the parameters, but... 

But I am totally lost what exactly should I do next? :) As the QMGTOOLs functions, when used from 5250 Emulator window, still report the Public IBM site as unreachable...

Anyone made this feature working for such purposes? Thanks!

Dear Marc

Your hot link does not work.    Did you actually meant this URL:  https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.5?topic=ssw_ibm_i_75/cl/chgsrvcfg.html ? 

Hello Michal (I hope everything is running fine for you!)

I never used it and am no more in a situation to do so.

But, when thinking loud, if ACS proxy runs like a standard proxy, it should start a tcp listener on your PC on a port that you have to identify (standard proxy port is 8080). Therefore you can maybe use CHGSRVCFG command to specify a proxy in order to download PTFs. Check out https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.5?topic=ssw_ibm_i_75/cl/chgsrvcfg.html#CHGSRVCFG.PROXY with the IP of your PC. Regarding QMGTOOLS, sorry but I have no idea how to set this proxy option.

Hi all,

on one of the the COMMON Europe conference, multiple people have mentioned the ability to use your PC as a proxy for an IBM i internet access, when your IBM i system works in some kind of a restricted environment. I'd found it useful for a "direct" check/upload of the PTFs to the system and to make a good use of the QMGToolset functions.

However there is very little-to-no documentation on how exactly should this setup work, besides an open source management related stuff, which I'm not interested in at the moment. I was able to find out that laptop<>internet uses HTTPS and laptop<>IBM i uses SSH.

I'm able to register the QIBM_ACS_HTTP_PROXY function usage for my profile and I can open the "proxy GUI" using the acsbundle.jar package. It tells me to pass the http_proxy and https_proxy variables to an ssh terminal along with the export commands. So I open a putty session to the IBM i system, pass on the parameters, but... 

But I am totally lost what exactly should I do next? :) As the QMGTOOLs functions, when used from 5250 Emulator window, still report the Public IBM site as unreachable...

Anyone made this feature working for such purposes? Thanks!

Hello Michal (I hope everything is running fine for you!)

I never used it and am no more in a situation to do so.

But, when thinking loud, if ACS proxy runs like a standard proxy, it should start a tcp listener on your PC on a port that you have to identify (standard proxy port is 8080). Therefore you can maybe use CHGSRVCFG command to specify a proxy in order to download PTFs. Check out https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.5?topic=ssw_ibm_i_75/cl/chgsrvcfg.html#CHGSRVCFG.PROXY with the IP of your PC. Regarding QMGTOOLS, sorry but I have no idea how to set this proxy option.

Hi all,

on one of the the COMMON Europe conference, multiple people have mentioned the ability to use your PC as a proxy for an IBM i internet access, when your IBM i system works in some kind of a restricted environment. I'd found it useful for a "direct" check/upload of the PTFs to the system and to make a good use of the QMGToolset functions.

However there is very little-to-no documentation on how exactly should this setup work, besides an open source management related stuff, which I'm not interested in at the moment. I was able to find out that laptop<>internet uses HTTPS and laptop<>IBM i uses SSH.

I'm able to register the QIBM_ACS_HTTP_PROXY function usage for my profile and I can open the "proxy GUI" using the acsbundle.jar package. It tells me to pass the http_proxy and https_proxy variables to an ssh terminal along with the export commands. So I open a putty session to the IBM i system, pass on the parameters, but... 

But I am totally lost what exactly should I do next? :) As the QMGTOOLs functions, when used from 5250 Emulator window, still report the Public IBM site as unreachable...

Anyone made this feature working for such purposes? Thanks!