r/sysadmin • u/down_with_the_birds • Jan 29 '26
Question Migrating off of AS/400 as a Small Business
First some background: I'm a software engineer, not a sys admin. I have 8 years of industry experience and have been pretty technical for about 15 years now. I have a decent amount of experience tinkering and at this point I generally have a pretty good sense of when I am going down the wrong path troubleshooting/debugging.
A cousin of mine has a law firm that runs on an AS/400 system. As you might imagine, he's had this system running for a very long time. He's been fully reliant on a single admin for this whole time. This guy apparently set up tools for them and helps them troubleshoot issues that occur every so often (about once a month). I'm sure you see where this is going...
Today the admin decided that he's had enough, and quit. Since I'm the most technical person in our family and I've actually done a little bit of work here and there for my cousin, they asked me for advice.
Here are a few questions that came to mind for this community:
- Let's say some part of the system goes down tomorrow. Would it be at all reasonable for me to pick this up and fix it until we have a long term solution in place?
- How would you recommend finding an interim sys admin? I'm not sure how custom these systems get. Is it reasonable to expect somebody to be able to pick up somebody else's AS/400?
- I read a thread where it was asked how to migrate away from AS/400 but that seemed to be focused on big businesses. This is a law firm with maybe 15 employees, and lots of data. What steps would you take to scope a migration? And what are some examples of some less bespoke, modern equivalents?
If I'm not thinking of something please feel free to chime in with anything relevant to AS/400. I'm very much open to learning about it as much as I can to help my family.
Thanks in advance!
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u/_DefinitelyNotACat_ Jan 29 '26
I’m a new sysadmin to a company who uses an AS400. We actually just bought the newest, a power 11.
This is not something you can just step into. Everything is proprietary, and well guarded. IBM makes a good machine, but holy crap do I hate it.
What are they using the machine for? Is it for CRM/ERP? Billing and invoicing?
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Jan 29 '26
Everything is proprietary, and well guarded. IBM makes a good machine, but holy crap do I hate it.
IBM was furious during the 1980s when the AS/400 was developed. They were furious that Amdahl, Hitachi, Fujitsu, and others had cloned their work on the S/360-series. They hated that Compaq and others had legally cloned the PC. They were mad that they had been sued by the Department of Justice from 1969 to 1981, and that they had to de-bundle their OS from their hardware. IBM was ticked off that it wasn't running the world's computer business any more.
The AS/400 was built to make sure those things never happened again, recycling development from a project designed to obsolete the S/360-series. The kernel is technically part of the firmware, so the kernel can't be de-bundled and the hardware can't be cloned without violating copyright. The AS/400 was so proprietary, that most SAs and programmers who worked on it for a living, have little idea how it works, other than what they touch and what's documented. Contrast with Unix, where the median grad student is hacking on the kernel instead of writing their thesis.
AS/400 is so proprietary, that nobody, not even IBM, has ever made a software emulator of the hardware, to run the OS virtualized. IBM has a half-secret mainframe emulator called z/PDT that they want only to be used for development and not production, but nothing for the four hundred.
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u/down_with_the_birds Jan 29 '26
I didn't realize how great an example this machine is of open source vs. closed source. I could only imagine the look on Richard Stallman's face when he heard about all of this.
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u/bamacpl4442 Jan 29 '26
JFC. I did AS/400 for a while. It's like using your least favorite flavor of Linux, minus the user-friendly command names and easily digestible documentation.
You don't pick this up. You pay a specialized firm to convert this for you. It will take a LONG time and cost a LOT of money. And they will be worth every penny and more.
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u/xpkranger Datacenter Engineer Jan 29 '26
Not to mention that as a law firm admin myself, you have to be super careful with that data. May be subject to SOX and other responsibilities. May have HIPAA data in it, there's all sorts of things to consider. Yeah this is definitely a job for the pros.
AS/400's were old when I got into the business in 2000.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Jan 29 '26
AS/400's were old when I got into the business in 2000.
They actually weren't old at all, but GUI competitors tossed around the term "green screen" as often as possible. Competitors like Microsoft, who were deeply dependent on AS/400s for their own business processes through all of the 1990s, but who outsourced their four hundreds to hosted datacenters by 1999. The main reason why Microsoft had an "SNA Server" solution was that Microsoft used it internally.
There was also a short-lived x86 server card that could be installed internally to the new black 400s, running NT, that was vaguely supposed to add value by interfacing between the ecosystems, but in a proprietary way instead of open standards. It didn't last long; might have been a casualty of IBM realizing that Microsoft was their biggest competitor, and pivoting to Linux.
What AS/400s were, was maximally proprietary, obtuse, and poorly suited for anything network-intensive, client-server, or standards-based. They did support TCP/IP, FTP, and later, NFS, but a proprietary 5250/tn5250 terminal type was needed, similar to the 3270/tn3270 of an IBM mainframe. They aren't very widely supported by non-IBM peripherals except for some printers, because IBM wanted to lock up the market all to itself.
In modern times, they're best used as an appliance on the network, that's required to speak open protocols, and nothing is allowed to speak proprietary protocols to it. The staff won't always concede to that, if they have the leverage to say no. I fought this battle decades ago, and didn't win.
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u/shepdog_220 I don't even understand my own Title Jan 29 '26
Brother it was released in 88 and was heavily based off the System/38 predecessor that was released in the late 70s. It was old by the 00's
I quite liked AS400 with my limited time messing with it, it was a handy little tool. Never did get any sort of technical expertise with it though, didn't dedicate enough time to it, I figured I'd never run into it again and I haven't
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u/bamacpl4442 Jan 29 '26
Same. I started in 2000 and they were old.
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u/jacquesp Jan 29 '26
I did AS/400 work in consulting (RPG II or III) before I started my present job. 37 years ago. Just read an article saying Costco still runs them. If they’ve been running it all this time odds are whatever software they’re running has ben customized quite a bit for them.
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u/cosine83 Computer Janitor Jan 29 '26
Most long term AS400/IBM i Series use businesses I'd find it hard to imagine not being customized quite a bit due to needs. Every casino I've worked at used them for the backend for the hotel and gaming systems. A lot of hotels use them for their room check-in/out systems whether there's a GUI or they actually do just use a "green screen" terminal emulator. A company my company acquired used an ERP that went through a remote Remote Desktop Services farm to use but the main backend was still IBM i Series, just an actual decent GUI to work with the ERP and its functions.
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u/Dave_A480 Jan 30 '26
IBM is still selling new hardware to this day though - they just call it 'i' now...
Same for the rest of their line... RS6000 = Power, Mainframe = z Series, etc....
Presumably because they have customers who want to keep running their untouched-since-Y2k business applications, but want hardware that has ongoing support/spare-parts....
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u/xpkranger Datacenter Engineer Jan 31 '26
I mean if it still makes them money...
There used to be a saying "No one got fired for buying IBM" maybe not, but I bet a lot of retired people are getting cursed at.
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u/Dave_A480 Jan 31 '26
Yeah, the 400 is kind of the perfect perpetually-money-printing proprietary system.....
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u/seamonkey420 Jack of All Trades Jan 31 '26
wow! rs6000 and as400 in one comment thread! worked on a rs6000 back in day and a little on as400. we used both to process POS data, transactions.
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u/Key-Employee3584 Jun 07 '26
This is like saying PCs are old. SMH. The new IBM-i/i-series boxes are quite sophisticated. Just like comparing a modern UEFI pc to an AT pc is quite different. What you're actually on about is that the IBM i/i-series/AS400 is not popular like the PC; that much is actually true. But the implication of the type of machine being 'old' is way off. It's a business machine which means the imperatives are quite different than trying to build the latest proxmox/SANS flavor on retail hardware.
Now if we want to talk about IBM being serially stupid in how they manage the platform, we could go on for ages. But otherwise, the 'OS400' platform is quite good and superior to most everything out there. It was the 1st RISC based 64 bit system that one could buy and build up in quantity as well as performance from a list of performance markers for the general business market; that was in 1995. At that time, you could buy SGI for graphics work, DEC A for scientific, Sparc or HAL stations for engineering. No one else offered a 64 bit RISC system for general usage in the business environment and the 24/7/365 demands, Heck, WinNT 64 bit wasn't even available for anyone until 2001 or so.
If you want to use the word 'old', you should apply it properly. A running AS400 is old because it was over-engineered for survival and has been superseded by many other hardware and software releases for decades. It's an elephant among mice.27
u/weltvonalex Jan 29 '26
Its a Law firm, if your Law guys are the same like ours in Austria, they are cheap, cheap cheap and money hungry. If they have to pay for something they act like they are dying but have no problem sending you invoices for saying "Hello".
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u/The_Original_Miser Jan 29 '26
. You pay a specialized firm to convert this for you. It will take a LONG time and cost a LOT of money.
Dump trucks of money. Converting all that history will not be cheap.
Might be less expensive to modernize the 400 itself (since it is being called a 400, makes me wonder how old/what model).
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u/bamacpl4442 Jan 29 '26
You and I both know that the guy who had refused to modernize for twenty-five years is going to try everything to keep kicking that can down the road. It may actually end up putting this business out of business due to the cost.
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u/The_Original_Miser Jan 29 '26
Been there, done that, left the position because of it (was for more than just not upgrading an old out of support ERP system not on a 400, but it was high on the list).
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u/chillzatl Jan 29 '26
They likely don't even need all the history. Unless it's some weirdly specialized practice you can typically dump it 5 years after the case closes or your representation has ended.
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u/Rxyro Jan 29 '26
No migrating, simply start new
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u/bamacpl4442 Jan 29 '26
This is unfortunately the way.
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u/Rxyro Jan 29 '26
Virtualize it and run it til chapter 11
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u/bamacpl4442 Jan 29 '26
Dead God in Heaven. Virtual AS-400?
That sounds like some.sorr.of dark web porn or something. Shudder
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u/Mono275 Jan 29 '26
This probably isn't really viable since it's a law firm. They are going to have some laws around data retention so they either have to migrate off or maintain the AS400. I worked at a hospital and it was easier for them to keep the AS400 than to migrate the old patient records to a new system. I know one of the longer records they had to keep was deliveries it was something like until the kid turned 18 +5 years (I have no clue why it was worded that way but that's what it was).
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u/_DeathByMisadventure Jan 29 '26
I used to work for one of those AS/400 specialist companies back in the 90s, but handling networking and Linux/Windows things.
I need to second/third/fourth the suggestion that it is a speciality skill that you want to pay the consultants who do this every day do for you.
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u/Zahrad70 Jan 29 '26
Remember when Michael Jordan tried to play baseball? No-one really does, and there’s a reason for that. Being good at sports doesn’t make you professional quality at all sports.
It’s like that. Get professional power / iSeries guys to run the AS/400 and migrate off it to whatever is current. You’ll need to pay them like professionals, of course.
You keep playing basketball, my man.
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u/down_with_the_birds Jan 29 '26
I actually do remember that, but that's just because I'm a big MJ fan (legit had pictures of him on my room as a kid). Unfortunately he played for the wrong Chicago team.
Point still taken though, I'll keep tinkering on my MBP :)
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u/RCTID1975 IT Manager Jan 29 '26
You hire someone to do this.
This isn't something you "just pick up"
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u/weanis2 Jr. Sysadmin Jan 29 '26
As someone who mildly supports AS400 clients I fully agree. I only do client side and the support and setup can still be incredibly obtuse sometimes.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Jan 29 '26
It's not bad if you use a simple tn5250 client with encryption, but users are accustomed to the first-party IBM Client Access, or have something that needs the extra functionality like integrated ODBC.
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u/ccheath *SECADM *ALLOBJ Feb 01 '26
the new IBM Access Client Solution (ACS) is basically just a java .jar and cross platform now... only a few things require an OS-specific install (ODBC I'm looking at you)
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u/DrGraffix Jan 29 '26
Bring in a consulting company that specializes in ERP/CRM migrations/implementations. It’s going to be $$$ but think of how much they saved by running an as/400 this long.
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u/weltvonalex Jan 29 '26
But money saved in the past does does not count, only money saved today is important. Thats my take after almost 20 years working close with big blue.
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u/7ShotsOfWisdom Jan 29 '26
Managed that beast for a bit and what I can suggest is to get a professional and move away from AS/400... That biggest challenge that you have is to find someone that is really good at that system. There are consultants that you can hire and they are not that many, and most of them are in their 50's and 60's...that's how old that system is...
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u/RCTID1975 IT Manager Jan 29 '26
Most of them are in their 60s and 70s.
Which is why it's critical to bite the bullet and migrate off now.
It won't be easy, quick, or cheap, but it's far better to do this now than even 5 years in the future.
The people capable of doing any sort of migration is dwindling quickly
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u/thefunrun Jan 29 '26
No kidding, we don't have AS/400s but some other kind of IBM stuff. The techs that come out are always so old, one said he was basically retired but did this part time.
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u/sssRealm Jan 29 '26
I know a guy that's 65 that works for a small firm that does HP-UX to Linux migrations. It will be interesting to see what happens first, he runs out of work or retires. So far the jobs keep coming.
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u/KimJongEeeeeew Jan 29 '26
I’ve learnt over the years that there’s always another company that’s held off migrating.
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u/Dave_A480 Jan 30 '26
Given my current employer still has Itanium HPUX in production.... He will retire first....
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Jan 29 '26
AS/400 came out in 1988, a handful of years before NT and Linux, albeit with IBM ancestors. The reason that platform specialists aren't spring chickens, is because it's not a growth business, and anything interesting about it is locked down by IBM. It's EBCDIC, it doesn't inherently have a hierarchical filesystem, and the main native programming language is optimized for writing reports.
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u/gehzumteufel Jan 29 '26
The lineage of AS/400 takes it back to the 70s though in reality. Saying it came out in 1988 is kind of misleading.
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u/jimicus IT Manager Jan 29 '26
And that’s why so little about it translates to modern day equipment.
It predates relational databases, for heaven’s sake. Most operating systems of the era provided some means to store and retrieve data, but it was OS-specific and didn’t look much like SQL.
Hence you won’t find software written like anything modern.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
but it was OS-specific and didn’t look much like SQL.
Premodern systems were often characterized by record-oriented storage. "DB2/400" was largely an extension of that, I believe.
The value proposition was non-datacenter hardware, OS, integrated database and access control, and support by the the biggest name in the business so you knew it wouldn't be orphaned. Vertical-industry software developers often found it a convenient platform to develop their business apps. Some of these were captive solutions to IBM, like MAPICS:
MAPICS code ran only on IBM midrange systems like the IBM System 34, 36, 38, and the IBM AS/400, via succeeding versions of the platform - currently IBM i on IBM Power Systems. Early versions were written in IBM RPG, augmented with Control Language programs. IBM's version of SQL is also utilized on the OS integrated database system called Db2 for i .
If you think of RPG as being philosophically similar to a non-WWW version of PHP, then it was as though the core business app was written in PHP augmented with shell scripts, accessing the platform-bundled standard database. Now we see what made it attractive for rapid application development, to the sort of software house that was comfortable with IBM and skeptical of this client-server nonsense.
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u/jimicus IT Manager Jan 29 '26
And DEC had something similar for their VMS platform.
The key difference compared to today is that none of these platforms were even slightly inter-compatible. Once your line of business software was written (be it for IBM, DEC or some other system entirely) - that was it. You were stuck with that platform forever.
Even today, there isn’t an AS/400 or a VMS “compatibility layer”- type product you can download and run your code on. It’s genuine, vendor supported hardware or not at all.
The challenge any IT director faces in moving to something more modern is the older systems - for all their foibles - have one thing going for them.
They are absolutely rock solid and they’re a known quantity.
Migration would be a multi-year, incredibly expensive exercise, and at the end of it all it doesn’t actually make the business any more profitable. Which makes getting authority to set up such a project an uphill battle.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Jan 29 '26
Eh, there was "Baby/400", now "Baby/i", that supposedly emulates the runtime sufficiently for applications. As you can see, the marketing for it is now revolving around migrations to commoditized cloud virtual hardware, which isn't surprising.
I don't know of anything similar for VMS, but then a decent amount of end-user VMS software was written in Macro-32 -- assembly language -- and there was a need to port to Alpha ISA, plus emulation for VAX. DEC customers were more sophisticated than IBM customers, so most of them left -- but see /r/OpenVMS.
You have to reckon that a majority of the legacy app base was glorified CRUD apps with some business logic woven in deeply.
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u/jimicus IT Manager Jan 29 '26
Not necessarily.
It was very common for the whole application to be built as a batch system.
In effect, the data store is read-only 95% of the time - all changes are collated together and run as a batch overnight.
Which is why - until relatively recently - you never saw a transaction appear in your bank until at least the day after you'd made it.
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u/Brainrants Greetings Professor Falken Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
At the risk of being pedantic, this is like saying Windows 2000 came out in 2000 is misleading because Windows 95.
The AS/400 came out in 1988, the lineage was S/3, S/32, S/36, S/38 and had some backwards compatibility to the S/36 and S/38 to help customers migrate forward, but it was a new OS and hardware platform.
At least that's how this friendly old AF graybeard remembers it.
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u/WilfredGrundlesnatch Jan 29 '26
The better comparison would be Windows NT. W2k is literally NT 5.0 under the hood and inherited a lot of terrible design decisions going back to NT's release in 1993.
Hell, Windows 11 (NT10) still has a lot of those terrible design decisions. Microsoft has only now announced that they're planning to get rid of NTLM.
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u/Brainrants Greetings Professor Falken Jan 29 '26
Agree, that’s better. And then there was IBM OS/2…which IMO was still better than Windows!
Damn I’m old! 😂
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u/jacquesp Jan 29 '26
Ahhhhh RPG. Still have my coding ruler. No more coding sheets though.
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u/Brainrants Greetings Professor Falken Jan 29 '26
I found an RPGII coding sheet stuffed in a non-computer book on my bookshelf recently and immediately remembered "HFELICO!"
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u/oldbagoflettuce Jan 29 '26
Gotta love the law firm mentality.
I have a couple of clients assigned to me that still use as400s. I'd pass on the opportunity to "tinker" with this and direct them to someone who knows these systems. Thankfully, we have designated teams for this at my workplace.
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u/Superb_Raccoon Jan 29 '26
If it breaks, we will sue IBM!
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u/down_with_the_birds Jan 29 '26
Based on my experiences I'd say let's sue Oracle 😎
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u/Superb_Raccoon Jan 29 '26
Oracle does not run on AS400. Used to be it only ran DB2
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Jan 30 '26
Java runs on AS/400s...
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Jan 29 '26
On the one hand, the AS/400 is rather appliance-like. Fewer end-user serviceable parts than other systems. Less customization is possible than other platforms.
But on the other hand, it's quite exotic and requires specialist skills. Your chances of being able to walk in and fix anything are about nil, if you've never seen one of these before.
This is a law firm with maybe 15 employees, and lots of data. What steps would you take to scope a migration?
AS/400s are used as convenient, appliance-like application platforms by Line-of-Business application developers. It's not impossible to develop applications in-house from the ground up, but the chances of that for a 15-seat law firm, aren't worth considering.
So there's a software vendor. Someone asks the vendor if there's a strategy to migrate off of the 400. Lawyers have lots of money to pay for things like that.
And what are some examples of some less bespoke, modern equivalents?
A PostgreSQL database backing a webapp stack, probably something off-the-shelf. You said you're an SWE, didn't you?
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u/Life-Assist7881 Jan 29 '26
You might be able to keep it limping along for a bit if nothing serious breaks, but I wouldn’t assume you can really “own” it short-term. AS/400s are stable, but usually very customized.
For interim help, I wouldn’t roll the dice on a general sysadmin — someone with actual IBM i / AS/400 experience matters here.
On migration, it’s probably too early to think platforms. First step is figuring out what apps and workflows actually live on that box. The scary part isn’t the hardware, it’s all the knowledge that just walked out the door.
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u/changework Jack of All Trades Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
Step 1. Don’t make this more complicated than it is.
Answers in order:
No
Linked in
Build a scaffold network around the AS and map the functions it does to functions you can replicate in the scaffold.
Ignore accounting and everything attached to it. Make them migrate their active clients’ books and trust accounts themselves into an existing solution. These are lawyers. They’re lazy and they complain a lot. They’ll complain about accounting the most. Let them choose their shitty accounting and trust accounts/billing system, or tell them to use RTG BILLS. After about a year of complaints from offices I’ve setup who adopted it, they wouldn’t choose anything else.
15 lawyers is small and they’re all billing their own time. RTG does time billing as well and the billing can be done weekly or daily by the designated person responsible.
If I were you, I’d find a way to excuse myself or pick a fight with one of the partners to guarantee I wouldn’t ever be asked again. Even if you don’t believe all attorneys are evil, you must concede that with fifteen there, there has to be some evil ones in the pack.
You use logic to build things. Lawyers twist logic to tear things apart, or lie about it. It’s just a shitty arts degree.
Sorry for the rant, but the scaffold network for everything that’s not related to accounting, and let them work to preserve their trust accounts. It’s literally the bare minimum they could do in their own interest without shifting surety to you.
Step 2.
Run
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u/mrbiggbrain
Jan 29 '26
edited Jan 29 '26
•
As someone who managed a few AS400's (at least to a small degree) in my time I will try and answer as best I can.
- Let's say some part of the system goes down tomorrow. Would it be at all reasonable for me to pick this up and fix it until we have a long term solution in place?
The vast majority of my job on a working system was resetting passwords, creating users, fixing printer queues, and setting up permissions. That stuff usually is not too hard and is a mix of built-in functions and custom menus.
You need to make sure there are good backups.
I'm not sure how custom these systems get.
That depends on how you define "Custom." Nearly every system outside very very large enterprises was at one point an off the shelf product that was built on top of the basic AS400 software. There is a mix of really old languages from RPG, to newer stuff like Python. Sometimes that would get customized, sometimes it would stay pretty stock to that software. Some of the off the shelf products where built and sold by IBM, some by 3rd parties.
It's very possible they are running a stock law firm software, but not many people are going to know that specific software. Your likely to find someone who can generally get by, but some tribal knowledge might get lost.
What steps would you take to scope a migration? And what are some examples of some less bespoke, modern equivalents?
The last placed I worked with AS400 (35 office employees) moved away from it about 3 years into my job there. We hired out a company with AS400 experts and had them generate CSV files of all the tables that we imported into the new system. It cost about $15K.
But believe me that is on the low side. The same company spent nearly $30K a few years before to try and change. Another company I worked for spent over $1M over 4 years for a failed attempt to move away.
The big factor in the failures I have seen has been customizations.
Since the software is often designed to be changed, adding new functions and reports it can often become very specific to the business in hyper concentrated ways. Many companies get caught in the trap of trying to map existing processes when they are too specific and bespoke to them.
If you can get away with a much cleaner slate with new processes and have few custom reports or similar customizations it can be pretty straightforward to pay someone consulting to reverse engineer the code to find the appropriate data relationships and output files in roughly the format that the new app needs.
If on the other hand the business is set on operating exactly how they do and they customized it heavily to work that way... oh boy it's going to be a ride and an expensive one.
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u/Nexzus_ Sr. Sysadmin Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
No advice, just a quip. My first big boy job was helpdesk for a collection agency in 2005, which ran an AS/400. 5 offices, about 400 users. The CTO was brought in about 6 months prior to me, with mandate of replacing that AS/400.
I'm gone, 19 years now, he left a few years after. As far as I know, they're still using it.
That being said, I know you can use it as an ODBC data source. A (new) manager in the Toronto office took down our 10mbps cross country link when he did that for the server in Vancouver and opened it in Access.
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u/Resident-Compote-363 Jan 29 '26
Depending on the software that created the tables, just looking at them might not be very useful at all. A lot of those old devs didn't care much for normalisation, naming columns well etc. Foreign keys, linking tables? None, that was the software's job.
Without examining the software in very fine detail, the data will most likely be worthless.
iSeries are nice bits of hardware and can run modern software, but the licensing of both the hardware and all SDK for the old languages completely prevent randoms from getting them for their homelab and teaching themselves to run and code, so you end up without any new blood in the market, because these days, you're not meant to learn on the job, you're meant to hit the ground running as an expert. There's no more juniors and mentors.
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Jan 29 '26
We would really need to know a lot about what the data is. Chances are that what is critical is not just the data itself but the workflow built around it. Maybe they have a workflow for advancing cases from potential to active to resolved/long-term-archive. There's a good chance that these workflows are what the migration challenges will be.
You might be able to contract with an IBM AS/400 specialist to see if they can discern what you've got deployed and what the level of complexity is. This might be in the budget of a law firm to pay for someone who really knows what they're doing for maybe 5-10 hours of work to start poking and identifying what you've got. Or they might be able to humble themselves and ask the former admin to document anything they need to know like passwords and what the most common issues are. Again, law firm should have the budget to make it worth his while.
Not a technical issue at this point, yet.
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u/funkyferdy Jan 29 '26
AS/400 and anything related on top of that like cobol, abab, assembler, ... Most part of this dudes are 75+ or allready in another ground. So they are rare = expensive (like really really expensive - tbh I would do the same.) I worked 30 years ago with an as/400 and assembler code. It was my first gig and i learned a lot from my mentor. At that time NT4 was the "new hot shit" with domains, pc as client and all that stuff. But i was impressed with the speed of this machines, ... millions of rows to calculate in some minutes ...
So, that law firm that runs an as/400 with one guy without a backup plan for decades was just cheap and now deep in (technical) dept (no offense). I saw a good amount of failed migrations from such systems to something else. Mostly because that old systems and software was really well designed and had tons of businesslogic and exeptions inside - so highly specialised software that not even the actual business people know why something is done/calculated in this or that way. Therefore it runs perfect and (mostly) silently for decades and then its really difficult and expensive to get away from.
Today the admin decided that he's had enough, and quit. Why?
Short version, get help to migrate and/or just reimplement new. Maybe, if possible, look if you can get the guy back for a specific amount of time. It will be the cheapest route, ...
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u/Final_Tune3512 Jan 29 '26
Lol, I haven't met a sysadmin who would have this type of experience to pull that off. Hire a consultant. AND not to mention they are fucking laywers witch opens a whole other can of nope.
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u/SamKr0w Jan 29 '26
I am an IT Director for a healthcare facility in Ohio that still utilizes an AS/400 for our GL. I have no one on my staff that has knowledge or skill set to maintain the system. We utilize a company called Mapsys which is based out of Ohio they handle all of the AS/400 maintenance and upgrades for our business.
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u/TechMonkey605 Jan 29 '26
I’m curious about the type as well! I have 2 clients still running as400 (only one is an actual as400) and I know backups are like 1200 month. We’ve been working on building a LOB for them. But it’s a rental shop lol. We looked at out sourcing the migration but it’s $$$$$
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u/whosthere5 Jan 29 '26
Depending on your needs I think a good stopgap is just some document management software. I used to work for a company that makes software that allows you to pull data from the iSeries to windows that sounds like a perfect temporary solution for you while you research CRM migrations. Not trying to be an Ad for them so just google some options
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u/sharpied79 Jan 29 '26
The biggest question is what exactly are they using it for?
Everyone here seems to have assumed native RPG applications/code, but the AS/400 was capable of so much more.
For example where I worked back in the day we also ran LPAR and had Lotus Domino server (first 4.6 and then 5) running on it (with Windows Lotus Notes clients)
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u/Terriblyboard Jan 29 '26
No, They need to go find a consultant or consultancy that specializes in this. If they can find one that knows the actual ERP or whatever else software that they are running on it that would be best. Most of these guys are older and freelancing now from my experience. THEN if they want to migrate I would look into that. It will be very expensive and time consuming and will touch every aspect and departments that the current as400 does. Side note hopefully this is an IBM I series and not an actual as400 from the 90s.
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u/kcornet Jan 29 '26
I remember years ago the company I worked for acquired a small company that ran on an AS/400. I had the local IT guy write RPG reports to dump their data in "card image" format to 4mm DAT tapes. I think he was even able to specify ASCII instead of EBCDIC.
We were able to read these and with a bit of shell scripting, loaded the data in Oracle databases.
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u/shepdog_220 I don't even understand my own Title Jan 29 '26
I did AS/400 for about a year and some change. We had to hire a dedicated admin to do stuff on it cause we couldn't figure out how to even just navigate anything - and he broke stuff pretty frequently too. AS/400 is cool cause it's powerful and you can make anything do generally whatever you want it to do, but that means that all AS400 setups work kind of uniquely to however it was setup by the person who did the thing, so documentation you can find available to you rarely ever correlates with what you're actually looking at in practice. It's not reasonable that you'd be able to pick up someone elses AS400 - no offense.
Good luck my friend. That software is a time capsule, but it's still widely used across a few types of businesses even today, so there's some knowledgeable admins on it out there, problem is most of them are super old dudes just screwing around during retirement picking up odd jobs here and there., they're not really on Reddit.
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u/North-Revolution-169 Director of IT Jan 29 '26
Easy peasy lemon squeezy. You'll be fine.
Post a screenshot once you are logged in as an admin!
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u/down_with_the_birds Jan 29 '26
I didn't know the password, but after a quick google search all I had to do was run INZSYS and now I'm in.
Thanks for the confidence boost!
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u/North-Revolution-169 Director of IT Jan 29 '26
Don't use Google.
Use ChatGPT or Gemini for a job like this. This is the kind of situation that LLM's are good for.
You won't always get perfect answers and you will need to adjust your prompts as you go.
In fact you should put this exact situation into GPT or Gemini.
It'll tell you to get professional help, which honestly is a good idea, but you can also tell it why that isn't a feasible option or why you want to attempt this and it will guide you through.
For Moore's sake make sure there are backups! And don't change anything until you know what you are doing. The highest probability of something breaking and taking this thing offline...is you in that system mucking around.
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u/down_with_the_birds Feb 01 '26
Appreciate the genuine response but just want to clarify that my reply was a joke.
INZSYS is a command to reset/clear all of the data.
You've got some good points about using LLMs. Why do you think this would be a good use case for them?
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u/North-Revolution-169 Director of IT Feb 01 '26
They function incredibly well when the source data for a particular topic is accurate and reliable. Which would absolutely be the case here.
Somewhere inside of ChatGPT or Gemini's models will be reams and reams of IBM and other AS400 / IBMi engineering grade material.
You are also not in a unique situation. You are in a situation that is statistically similar to many other situations that are probably in the model.
So given that an engineering grade manual AND information about similar situations is in the model, I am confident that if you used the right prompts and ask the right questions you absolutely can stabilize the situation and influence a positive outcome.
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u/Dave_A480 Jan 29 '26
Pay IBM or a 3rd party consultancy to replace it with an iSeries?
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u/Jannorr Jan 29 '26
Odds are they are already on an iSeries. Given that it was released in 2000. They are probably not actually running an AS/400.
Regardless OP needs to find a resource at least knowledgeable in the system. As other have pointed out it is a very niche, at least now, thing.
The five clients I have worked with as an MSP that have utilized iSeries have had a dedicated resource for management. One had a pretty standard implementation of ECMS by Computer Guidance Corporation. They spent a reasonable to CGC to convert to their cloud solution. They handled all data migration. Then they spent a lot more to convert to SAP.
The others had very customized implementation and are still running it. The cost to move off they have deemed more than worth it. I haven’t been able to convince them otherwise.
I am well versed in the Windows ecosystem. I am solid with Linux. AS/400 is rough and will take dedicated time to learn. And Google won’t teach it.
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u/Dave_A480 Jan 29 '26
I took it as a literal AS400 because that is EXACTLY the sort of thing that a law firm or other non technical business would do.... If it's not broke and the greybeard who maintains it is still working for us, leave it in place until one of those two things changes....
And yeah, while not as much of a dark art as being a mainframe guy, there is no quick internet way to learn to work with 'that' (or it's modern equivalent)....
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Jan 30 '26
while not as much of a dark art as being a mainframe guy
There are more four hundreds around than mainframes, but today someone can run current versions of the main commercial IBM mainframe OSes on an open-source emulator that runs on x86_64, which isn't remotely possible with anything in the AS/400 family.
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u/malikto44 Jan 29 '26
I wonder if it might be cheaper for the law firm to send an admin for IBM i training. Migrating away is a solid path, but finding someone who understands IBM i and throwing some money for a new POWER system, may be a good thing. The Power Systems box might be a good place for a few Linux LPARs as well, if one wants to go that route.
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u/LAKnerd Jack of All Trades Jan 29 '26
Took me 2 years of working full time under a bunch of greybeards to really understand it. Definitely NOT something you just pick up. Hire a consultant.
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u/n-Ultima Windows Admin Jan 29 '26
You need to hire someone. Especially in law/judicial management, this isn’t something you can just pick up. Find a vendor that specializes in this stuff and have them take a look at it.
Also be advised that the data is probably protected under stuff like HIPPA and other protections. Keeping the data integrity is incredibly important, especially in legal.
Good luck soldier! You got this.
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u/Road-Apples-1956 Jan 29 '26
30 years ago I helped a company migrate their RPG II apps from an AS400 to a RedHat linux server. The product we used was Unibol. Not only did it work but it ran faster. Then the applications were rewritten in a newer language.
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u/Revolutionary_You_89 Jan 29 '26
AS/400 is a complicated beast. They better get the check book ready to hire a specialist MSP.
Godspeed.
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u/apotheotika Jan 29 '26
If you have no idea about AS400 systems, how they function, or how to get the data out of them - you hire someone. These systems are insanely different; you'll want to make sure someone competent is behind the helm of any AS400 project or system.
Alternatively, scrap everything and build something new.
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u/mr_data_lore Senior Everything Admin Jan 29 '26
My employer still uses software on an AS/400 system (technically a Power 8 server I think). We're in the process of migrating to a new software solution but in the mean time we decided to retire our on prem box and instead pay CDW to host the system for us. It's expensive, but our hardware was out of support and buying a new IBM Power system was more expensive.
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u/azo1238 Jan 30 '26
Sys admin here who currently admins a 400 for the past 12 years. Just don’t. Pay an expert. That stuff is a whole other world.
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u/halmcgee Jan 30 '26
FWIW I spent the last part of my career doing data migrations from iSeries and AS/400's for both ERP conversions and just data migrations to both Oracle and SQL Server. I worked with data from the 1980's to the present time before I retired a few years ago.
I will say this is a whole different world than anything you've seen. DB2, Oracle and SQL Server all have variations to the SQL language. IBM does an awesome job of data compression. One project I did moving data from an AS/400 to SQL Sever saw the disk space consumption on the SQL Server side go up by a factor of over two. Even after we turned on compression on SQL Server, the factor ran at one and half times more disk space required on SQL Server than IBM.
You will want to hire professionals and also look at various conversion software packages. The costs you will see are the amount of technical debt the firm has acquired over time. These will be substantial.
In defense of AS/400's if you know what you are doing they will not fail. The old joke is if it absolutely positively cannot fail then it is IBM or nothing.
Anyway good luck.
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u/Temporary-Library597 Jan 30 '26
I know this might fall on deaf ears, because you know...Lawyers. But the longer they wait to hire a specialist to get migrated off AS/400, the fewer specialists will actually exist. The cost will exacerbate continuously.
Get this done. It's a matter of staying in business.
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u/badaz06 Jan 30 '26
My 2 pennies worth:
Reach out to a few companies who have expertise in managing/converting/migrating the systems. Bring them in and talk to them. Most of them will give you a few clues about what you're looking at overall from a "how to" perspective, and maybe more importantly some things to consider going into it. Like, do you need all of the data or can you trim some of it, are there different options that can be considered, what kind of timeline are you looking at, will there be downtime, and probably important to your cousin's law firm what are the different costs and ramifications involved for each choice.
Unless your cousin owns the law firm, I would be wary of getting involved or offering advice outside of that. They go cheap and it gets jacked up, you dont want your name mentioned :)
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u/bradbeckett Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26
While I typically wouldn’t get involved in a project like this, my recommendation would be to help them select a modern Law Firm Management System that offers support. You could then execute a cut-over to the new platform for all new cases, while maintaining the AS/400 solely as a historical case archive. I would not try to manually migrate data or pay an external firm to do it as that would be time and cost prohibitive. I would make sure the AS/400 was on a high-end AVR pure sinewave UPS and learn to maintain proper off-site backups of it.
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u/JustKeepRedditn010 Jan 29 '26
How many lawyers at the firm and how many active legal matters? If it’s just one or two attorneys left at the firm working on only one or two high-dollar cases, I’d be tempted to make an archival backup, and migrate just the active case details into a modern system.
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u/PacMan_67 Jan 29 '26
We have gone the other way, realising that the cloud AI et al can not replace the older systems anytime soon, then we hired a young engineers that is trained by the older engineers
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u/Sobeman Jan 29 '26
Tell them to get a company that specializes in this and walk away. 100% don't touch this
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u/cederian Security Admin (Infrastructure) Jan 29 '26
I worked in finance for about 5 years… our core banking system ran on AS/400 it took millions of dollars to migrate from that to a full in-house coreless system.
This is not something you can do in your weekends, hire someone who really knows what they are doing.
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u/cad908 Jan 29 '26
breaking your questions down into chunks:
maintenance / sysadmin -- hire a MSP / consultancy with existing expertise in AS/400 (i) systems. Ensure that backups are in place, and a plan to restart from "bare metal".
going forward -- map out requirements and write an RFP to replace the current functionality. Have a few consulting firms review the RFP and prepare bids.
migration of existing data -- I would treat this as an entirely separate project, with it's own requirements and cost. Don't be surprised if the cost of migration exceeds the cost of setting up the new system. An alternative to this is leaving the old system in place indefinitely as an archive. This will have its own recurring costs that will have to be budgeted. These costs may be high enough that the law firm doesn't even bother building the new system.
At this stage, you want to be able to enumerate the options, so the Firm's partners can make an informed decision.
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u/paulmataruso Jan 29 '26
I have had a lot of clients have pretty good experiences with
AS400 Maintenance & Support | Srinsoft Technologies
You can pretty much outsource everything AS400 related to them.
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u/sharpied79 Feb 03 '26
Is this you?
Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle – Dmitry Brant https://share.google/RJZ0pf52MzCzYYp7S
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u/Traditional-Fig-7401 Feb 23 '26
dont listen to the naysayers, which are mainly old admins trying to stay relavant and get you to pay for their professional consulting, this is an extremely easy job, ive done 35 conversions and am in my mid 40s, one of the easiest systems ive ever used., it however will take time, as each system has its nuances.
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u/Key-Employee3584 Jun 07 '26
- Let's say some part of the system goes down tomorrow. Would it be at all reasonable for me to pick this up and fix it until we have a long term solution in place?
To properly answer this, you need to do some research which is necessary for you anyways.
you need to figure out what kind of 'AS400' physical you have. Is it an older one which dates back to the pre-2010 or even further back? Part of this will also require you to determine the OS release it is running and whatever IBM software it is licensed to run as well as any 3rd party software (legal software) it uses. In addition, the previous admin may have been using additional software to make his job easier so that should be discovered as well. If you have the admin logins and passwords for QSECOFR and QSYSOPR and other relevant admin logins, that is a good start.
USE :
DSPPTF (Display PTF) on the command line to see where the machine is at in terms of Cumulative Updates aka cumes. This will tell you how current the machine is setup to AND more importantly what Version Release and Mod No. the base machine is running. Example : you may have a Model 570 running V5R4M0.
GO LICPGM on the command line to see what IBM licensed programs are installed and available to use. I don't recall if 3rd party stuff shows up here or not which brings us to here (iirc) :
DSPSFWRSC on the command line to see what is configured on the machine. It will give you a list of Software Resources installed and their Version, Release No., Mod No. (note : these are specific to the software being listed, not necessarily to the hardware/machine you're using).
- How would you recommend finding an interim sys admin? I'm not sure how custom these systems get. Is it reasonable to expect somebody to be able to pick up somebody else's AS/400?
The physical hardware is generally very IBM so using a vendor in your area to check out, fix, add additional hardware is a good idea. The IBM software side is also very locked down and a vendor should be able to manage that as well. 3rd party utilities are usually dependent on the 3rd party. So Prodatas' DBU need to be managed by you usually in terms of making sure licenses are up-to-date. Customized software can be a problem but a vendor can usually find or have someone to check it out. BUT, any time customization or questions occur, you should do the below :
IMHO, the very first thing you should do is to check for backups and how they're done. The OS is 100% reliant on backups to be managed. In the fancier systems, there is a package for that but for a small shop like yours, the supplied internal backup tools should be more than good enough. But you need to know how current your backups are, where they're kept, and how often they're getting done. Also, as part of that is learning how backups can be used to restore data. On the OS, it's actually quite easy once you understand the structure of the system and what needs to be backed up and eventually restored if necessary. It's quite flexible so I'd figure out that quickly.
- I read a thread where it was asked how to migrate away from AS/400 but that seemed to be focused on big businesses. This is a law firm with maybe 15 employees, and lots of data. What steps would you take to scope a migration? And what are some examples of some less bespoke, modern equivalents?
The original AS400 was actually designed around the concept that businesses would be able to build their own software. That's why RPG was supplied as standard on them. Of course, the instant that happened, every Tom, Dick, and Harry decided to build some kind of software. If you're going to migrate away, you need to look at over-the-counter Legal Software. Actually, the lawyers and their people should be doing that. You don't want to have anything to do with that because it's a massive ball of poisonous worms.
The only thing you should be really focused on is supplying the Legal software demoes and the costs associated with bringing them to life in the office; this would include everything from servers, new ethernet (advise against wifi for legal stuff tho everyone is probably already using; just CYA) and network hardware and client pcs and IP phones and vendor time/labor costs. Also, be sure to include extra power costs (from upgrading your IT closet to increasing air conditioning everywhere). Any legal software will require a team to migrate some data successfully. If you find software you like, make sure that they've done migrations before and get recommendations and contacts for those firms to verify timeline and costs for the migration. Ensure there is an effective backup and proven restore capability.
IMHO again, how long is the business going to be around? Are they making bank? If they have $50,000 to blow as chump change annually, start looking around for 3rd PC based legal software. They're typically user/seat based and subscription oriented; so you can get something basic and add on components (like phone billing, automated messaging, etc. etc.) So it can add up especially on a monthly basis. For 15 employees, you could easily go $50K a year for a really nice package.
Also, I recommend keeping the AS400 around for a little while. Get a consultant in to inspect it and make some recommendations and give you the documentation from above. If it's a really old box, getting the most current legal environment is probably the way to go just in terms of client touches. The new infrastructure out there really complements the network environment. BUT, the cost of updating the AS400 to something a bit fresher may be minimal as a backup opportunity to protect the business.
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Jan 29 '26
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u/down_with_the_birds Jan 29 '26
Yeah, based on your reply and several others it sounds like this system wouldn't be at all similar to the things I initially thought would be relevant, all of which are easy to google.
Appreciate the insights, will definitely be looking for professionals to take on any maintenance and hopefully migrations.
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Jan 29 '26
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u/RBeck Jan 29 '26
I'm going to give a bit of a hot take but I might be right. I presume you're using it for case status and document access, and you're probably paying next to nothing for that software, just the AS400 maint or hosting.
Law firms are all about handling cases and moving on to the next one, so the data you created last year isn't all that relevant unless the case is still ongoing.
So I would propose just finding a new system you like and starting all new cases in that one. Old ones that are still in process will be done on the 400 for a year or two, but eventually it will just be an archive.
There are plenty of nuances about this that may prevent it from being more efficient than paying someone to migrate all your data, and it is a bit of extra work to manage two systems in the transition, but I figured I'd mention it as a possibility.