Guidelines for submitting remote commands

To remotely submit integrated Windows server commands, keep these guidelines in mind:

Many of the SBMNWSCMD parameters discussed in this section are not available when running Windows commands by using iSeries™ Navigator. If you need to use a parameter that iSeries Navigator does not support, then use Submit Network Server Command (SBMNWSCMD) directly.

• The requested command is run under the Windows console command "cmd.exe." SBMNWSCMD will not return control to its caller until the command has finished running on Windows and the cmd.exe program terminates.

• The authentication domain field of SBMNWSCMD indicates the Windows domain where your user ID is to be authenticated. The default, *PRIMARY, logs on to the primary domain of the server, if the server is a domain member. *LOCAL logs on to the server itself. The name of a trusted domain may also be specified.

• The QSECOFR user profile is handled differently than all other user profiles. User authentication is not performed on Windows when SBMNWSCMD is run by the QSECOFR profile. The requested Windows command is run under the Windows Local System Account. The Local System Account is used even if the QSECOFR profile is enrolled. The Local System Account does not have a password and lacks network access rights.

• Do not use the "/u" parameter with the Windows "cmd" command.

• SBMNWSCMD has limited support of Kerberos v5 authentication. Kerberos will only be used when the LCLPWDMGT user profile attribute is *NO. See SBMNWSCMD and file level backup support for Kerberos v5 and EIM.

• The Remote Command service and SBMNWSCMD are able to distinguish between ASCII multi-byte and unicode output data and convert them as appropriate.

• You can combine integrated Windows server commands into a single command string by using features of the Windows "cmd.exe" command interpreter. For example, on the SBMNWSCMD command line, you can enter net statistics workstation && net statistics server to collect statistics. However, commands that you combine in a single SBMNWSCMD request should not return mixed data (for example, a combination of ASCII and Unicode data), or data in mixed codesets. If the commands return different types of data, SBMNWSCMD may end abnormally with a message which indicates "a problem occurred in the data output conversion." In that case, run the commands separately.

• Do not use characters that are not normally available from the integrated server keyboard. In rare cases, an EBCDIC character in the active jobs coded character set may not have an equivalent in the active code page on Windows. Each different Windows application will give different conversion results.

• The Submit Network Server Command does not completely initialize your logon environment. The user's environment variables are set, but may not be completely equal to those provided by an interactive logon. Thus, environmental variables that an interactive logon normally sets to user-specific values may not exist or may be set to system default values. Any scripts or applications that rely on user-specific environmental variables may not operate correctly.

• If the home directory for your user ID on the integrated server is mounted on the local server, the Submit Network Server Command sets the current directory to your home directory. Otherwise, it tries to use /home/default or the local system drive.

• If the Load User Profile (LODUSRPRF) keyword is *YES, and if a user profile exists, SBMNWSCMD will attempt to load your Windows profile. You can then use commands that use or alter profile dependencies. However, there is no indication of profile load failures, beyond event log messages that may be produced by Windows. A windows profile can only be active in one Windows Logon session.

• You can use SBMNWSCMD to run integrated server applications as long as they do not require user intervention. The commands run in a background window, not on the integrated server console. If an application requests user intervention, such as popping up a message window, then SBMNWSCMD will hang, waiting for the command to complete - but no intervention is possible. If you end SBMNWSCMD on i5/OS™, it will attempt to end the hung Windows command. The background command stops whether GUI or console based.

• You can also run commands that require a yes or no reply to proceed. You do this by using input pipe syntax to provide the response. For example, echo y|format f: /fs:ntfs will let the format proceed after the Proceed with Format question raised by the format command. Note that the "y" and the pipe symbol "|" do not have a space between them. However, not all Windows batch commands support the piping of input (for example, the "net" command). Attempts to pass a default response may not be possible.

• You can prevent SBMNWSCMD from logging the command. If the command string contains sensitive data, such as passwords, that you do not want logged in error messages, do the following steps:

  1. Specify *NOLOGCMD as the command string.

  2. When the Command (not logged) field appears, enter the command to run in this field.
  Note, however, that the *NOLOGCMD option does not affect data that the command returns. If the command returns sensitive data, you can use the command standard output (CMDSTDOUT) parameter to store the output in a secure location, such as an integrated file system file.

• You can direct standard output from the command to your job log (*JOBLOG), to a spool file (*PRINT), or to an integrated file system (IFS) object. Standard error data always goes to the job log.

  When you specify *PRINT, the Work with Spool File (WRKSPLF) display shows SBMNWSCMD in the User Data field for the spooled file. If you select option 8 to display the attributes, the names of the specified integrated server and Windows command appear in the user-defined data field.

  When you specify an integrated file system object, the path name must already exist. If the integrated file system object name does not exist, SBMNWSCMD creates it.

• In the Convert standard output field, you can specify (*YES) to convert output from the Windows code set to the coded character set identifier (CCSID) of the i5/OS job.

  New IFS files will be created with the job CCSID. Output directed to an existing IFS object is converted to the IFS object CCSID. Output directed to a new member of an existing file in the /QSYS.LIB file system is converted to the existing file CCSID.

• If Convert standard output is (*NO), the Windows standard output will be written to the IFS object, or spool file, with CCSID conversion.