AS/400… In the cloud

I never thought I would be able to use that as a post title but, as reported by The Register, German hosting company Rechenzentrum Kreuznach has popped an AS/400 into the cloud, and anyone can use it for free. I’m anyone so I signed up.

Of course, there isn’t much point in having an account if I don’t have a terminal. Fortunately, Arch has everything.

I first tried tn5250 which proved to be a nice little package that can be started from the terminal. It certainly works and achieves exactly what it attempts. The only problems I encountered were that some of the key mappings were a bit odd (probably as a result of me using the wrong character map) and (more seriously) that running one terminal inside another can cause a little command key confusion.

It was at this point that I noticed that the AUR actually includes iSeries Access. Unfortunately, this is proving to be a bit of a struggle – the package maintainer appears to have assumed that I’ve already downloaded the RPM, which I have been unable to find. I’ve left a comment on the package asking about this and will come back to it if I am able to find the RPM somewhere… anywhere.

(Tangentially: How does IBM manage to continually build such awful websites? Every time I have to negotiate Big Blue’s labyrinthine online presence, I find myself faced with sites that are slow, clunky, painful to navigate and – all too often – completely inconsistent.)

So I turned to the TN5250 Java Edition. Installing and configuring this turned out to be a completely painless process, and I’m in.

To tell the truth, I’m not sure what – if anything – I will do with this. But it’s always fun to poke around an older bit of kit, if only to remind myself how far things have progressed over the past decade.

Note

The title of this post was changed at the request of Source Data who own the trademark for Cloud/400 and have asked me to avoid causing any confusion.