Local and remote administration on IBM i

You administer IBM MQ for IBM i objects locally or remotely.

Local administration means carrying out administration tasks on any queue managers that we have defined on your local system. In IBM MQ, you can consider this as local administration because no IBM MQ channels are involved, that is, the communication is managed by the operating system. To perform this type of task, you must either log on to the remote system and issue the commands from there, or create a process that can issue the commands for you.

IBM MQ supports administration from a single point through what is known as remote administration. Remote administration consists of sending programmable command format (PCF) control messages to the SYSTEM.ADMIN.COMMAND.QUEUE on the target queue manager.

There are a number of ways of generating PCF messages. These are:
  1. Writing a program using PCF messages. See Administration using PCF commands on IBM i.
  2. Writing a program using the MQAI, which sends out PCF messages. See Use the MQAI to simplify the use of PCFs.
  3. Use the IBM MQ Explorer, available with IBM MQ for Windows, which allows you to use a graphical user interface (GUI) and generates the correct PCF messages. See Use the IBM MQ Explorer with IBM MQ for IBM i.
  4. Use STRMQMMQSC to send commands indirectly to a remote queue manager. See Administration using MQSC commands on IBM i.
For example, we can issue a remote command to change a queue definition on a remote queue manager.

Some commands cannot be issued in this way, in particular, creating or starting queue managers and starting command servers. To perform this type of task, you must either log on to the remote system and issue the commands from there or create a process that can issue the commands for you.