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lemon.drops

After subjecting myself to a weekend of another neuron hanging, brain bashing RPG session (topic: subfiles arrrghh!!!) the gods of IT were not finished. I got a call last Sunday (no rest for the wicked eh?) from IT branch support asking why they can't access the "Beast" (iSeries 825)...How the hell should I know? Its Sunday and I'm about to extend my blessings to an "inaanak", oh well duty calls. So I told the staff I'll be there in a few minutes. Fortunately I'm only about 4 blocks away from the data center, so I rushed to the place, secured the keys, opened the server room...and just when I'm about to turn on the monitors, IT support calls in and tells me the server is ok! Arrgh...*!@#$%^&*! Why can't the Beast behave for crying out loud. So I left without so much as a whim, thinking its over and spent the rest of my Sunday with Gavin and Wifey.
Fast forward a day after, its about 10am and I'm talking with the training staff, another call comes in informing me of the same problem as yesterday, so I grabbed my pc and lo and behold! I got a gazillion jabber messages all asking the same thing "what happened to the server?" at this point my mind was flying in all directions...did the apps failed?, did the subsystem die somehow? did it finally gave out after 3 years of constant pounding by ever demanding users? Nah it couldn't be, the Beast was built for this, its self optimizing; self managing and self healing...well apparently those attributes don't really apply this time. So I opened up the server room door, turned on the lights walked straight to the console PC to view a message I'd never forget..."CRITICAL STORAGE CONDITION EXISTS", I examined the system status and there it was in big highlighted letters "% system ASP used....99.7298"!

99%?!, it was just 73% the last time I checked, needless to say I was about to faint at this point, I'm sweating (in a freezing room I might add) and I'm having tunnel vision.
The Beast is definitely sick, I mean who wouldn't be? If someone forced feed you, you'd be sick too. But in this case its not food, (but I was very hungry at that point :D ) but a renegade file spewing gigabytes of info and choked the Beast's innards. How did I find out? Here is something you might be able to use yourself.

SBMJOB CMD(DSPFD FILE(MYLIB/*ALL) TYPE(*MBRLIST) OUTPIT(*OUTFILE)
OUTFILE(MYLIB/MYFILE)) JOB(MYJOB) LOG(4 0 *SECLVL) LOGCLPGM(*YES)

where:
MYLIB = library you need to check
MYFILE = output file to store the results

After the job finished you need to review the results by creating an SQL query using MYFILE. You could then sort the result by file size and find which ones are the largest. One thing you should remember, and probably what most iSeries admins forget is that the largest figures might not be the biggest ones in terms of space consumption. Also take a careful look at the bottom of the listing, assuming you sort then in descending order(large file sizes first), and find files with negative disk spaces. These files may be negative because they exceeded the figure allowed in the output file and may well be the one you needed to trim down.
In our case the unexplained system usage was due to two entries at the bottom list and a failure on one of the 15 hard drives. Fortunately the Beast healed the disk after I told it to (so much for self-healing). After backing up and purging the contents (which took about half a day!) the Beast slimmed down to 56%...and my blood pressure and heart rate when down as well :D

So where do the lemon drops (my blog title) fit in the story? I've consumed a pack of Orbit Drops(lemon mint) through the whole ordeal. Its sugar-free and quite relaxing in the mouth, so I don't have to clench my teeth so much every time I see the usage meter rising! :D
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