By now, you've probably figured out many major features of IBM Director that you can use to manage your System i environment. IBM Director also provides many other often-missed but handy tools that make management even easier. So let's look at a few of these tools to see what the File Transfer, Remote Session, Asset ID, and System Accounts features have to offer.

File Transfer

The File Transfer function in IBM Director does a lot more than just transfer files. It also transfers folders (and subfolders) and synchronizes them so the contents match on both computers. It can even synchronize entire drives. The most obvious benefit is that you can transfer files between different types of operating systems such as AIX, Windows, Linux, or i5/OS.

When you first open File Transfer (Figure 1), you'll see that your PC is listed on the left, and the selected managed system is listed on the right. If you select the drop-down menu above the source file system, you can quickly change your selection to IBM Director Server. Now, you can transfer files from the Director server to the selected managed system. This customization means you can transfer files from your PC to any managed system, transfer files from your management server to any managed system, or transfer files from your PC to the management server (Figure 2). The one combination that you cannot do directly is transfer files between two managed systems. This is a two-step process: Transfer the file to the management server, and from there, you can transfer to the desired managed system.

Doing a transfer is simple: You can either find the file or folder you want to transfer and drag it to the desired location or select the item from the tree and use the Actions menu. If the transferred files need to live in a new folder, select Create Directory to generate one on either the source or target. You also have the power to delete or rename folders and to look at the properties of a file or folder for more details such as its size. Although there is a designated "source" and "target," you can transfer files in either direction. The file transfers use compression. You can change the kind of compression used in the Options menu. The different types include Off, Default, High, and Fast. If you decide to select another target system, a window will appear with a list of all the systems to which you can transfer.

One of the coolest features of File Transfer is synchronization. All you do is select a folder from your source list and a folder from your target list and select Synchronize from Source or Synchronize from Target. One of the folders is then assigned to be the master, and the other is updated to exactly match the contents of the master. This is great for making sure that the latest content is on your target while minimizing network traffic.

In addition, you can edit text files directly in File Transfer without having to transfer them to your PC. This is handy for .xml or .html files in which you may need to make small changes. However, this capability only really works for text files. It can open .exe or .zip files, but it won't really do much good because they open into a text editor.

Remote Session

Having the ability to get to your system's command line is critical. Because IBM Director supports multiple platforms, you can remotely access any operating system's interface using Remote Session. Here are your options:

• For i5/OS, Remote Session uses Telnet to get the 5250 display.
• For Windows, Remote Session brings you to a command/DOS prompt. Additionally, you can use Remote Control to display the server's Windows desktop. This is a useful feature for Integrated System x Servers in which you don't want a dedicated monitor for the Windows server.
• For Linux and AIX, Remote Session uses SSH to get to the command line.

Figure 3 shows what the i5/OS interface looks like. Although it is just a Telnet session under the covers, it does provide support for all the function keys. If you are familiar with the 5250 emulation keys, you will feel comfortable with these.

Asset ID

Every system is important in your environment, but in most cases, information about it that doesn't relate to hardware or software is hard to manage in a system-administration tool. Custom data that your business needs to keep track of such items as warranty, purchase date, and lease information is just not available.

In IBM Director, you can use Asset ID to manage this information. The first screen you see in the Asset ID dialog is the Serialization tab, which shows the serial numbers of the various components on your hardware (Figure 4).

Strangely, you cannot print these pages, but you can copy them and save them to a document or spreadsheet (or paste them into an email).

However, Asset ID offers much more than just showing details from your systems. It lets you add contact information, lease information, warranty information, and anything else you want stored on your system.

When you add your custom data, it is stored with the agent on the managed system (your i5/OS partition, for example). Then, whenever any management tool accesses that agent, the information is available for them to use without having to find the management server that originally stored it.

Additionally, you can collect the data and store it in IBM Director's inventory. This lets you create dynamic groups involving content you add to the Asset ID dialog for later use. For example, you could group systems based on location, warranty, or personal information.

One last note: The personalization page may look dull (with only five labels and associated values), but its true power lies in storing custom settings for each system. The data could be pretty much anything. Some examples could include the role a system plays (as web server or firewall, for example) or the primary workload it runs (such as WebSphere or VoIP). After you specify the value, you can collect records and store them in IBM Director's inventory. From here, the records can be used to create dynamic groups. This ability lets you manage your systems the way you work and think as opposed to how IBM works and thinks.

System Accounts

One well-hidden function in IBM Director is System Accounts. This function provides the ability to manage user profiles (and groups) in the operating system. It is a cross-platform tool, so you can create, edit, and remove profiles from all your System i operating systems. You can also see which users are disabled simply from the red "X" next to the name. Further, you can queue up several changes to your list of user profiles, and then click Apply when you are ready to make all the changes.

Figure 5 shows what the System Accounts dialog looks like: When you start making changes to an existing user or adding or deleting a user, you will get a message saying that no changes will be made until you click the Apply button at the bottom. Although this looks kind of funny, it can be a lifesaver after an accidental change.

If you open the properties of a user, you'll see the tabs in Figure 6. Although not as much customization is offered here as by Navigator for i5/OS (or the new Nav web UI on V6R1), you can perform the following:

• change the password
• enable/disable the profile
• update personal name and description
• manage group membership
• change home directory

There's Lots More

I could go on and on about all the neat little extras that IBM Director has to offer, but I think you get the point. There are a lot of great ways to manage your System i environment from IBM Director. For more information, go to the IBM Software Information Center (publib.boulder.ibm.com/eserver/swic.html) or the IBM Director website (ibm.com/systems/management/director).

Greg Hintermeister works at IBM as a user interaction designer and is an IBM master inventor. He has extensive experience designing user interaction for IBM's systems management and virtualization products, wireless applications, and numerous web applications. Greg is a regular speaker at user groups and technical conferences.