PPP connection through an ISP

Situation

Suppose that you are responsible for maintaining a system for MyCompany, a small manufacturing company in Boone, Iowa. You need to establish a connection between Electronic Customer Support and MyCompany's system.

Because MyCompany has an existing Internet dial-up connection, you can create a connection from your system through your modem and dial up connection to your ISP.

Solution

Create a Universal Connection to IBM® through a dialup connection over the Internet. In this case, you establish a connection through the Connection Manager on your local operating system through a point-to-point Internet connection to Electronic Customer Support.

Advantages

This scenario provides the following advantages:

• MyCompany does not need to invest in additional hardware or software to receive benefit from Electronic Customer Support. You can configure this connection through the Universal Connection wizard or CL commands.
• The Internet connection provides a simple means of ensuring that MyCompany has Electronic Customer Support available for ease of troubleshooting server problems, tracking current system hardware and software, or receiving software updates and fixes.
• You can use your existing ISP connection for Electronic Customer Support so that you do not need to disconnect from your ISP to connect to IBM.
  Note: In this scenario, MyCompany is using a dial-up ISP. You can use other originator ISP connections such as leased line or point-to-point over Ethernet.

Objectives

In this scenario, the customer wants to ensure that IBM can support the MyCompany system over the network through a point-to-point ISP connection. The objectives of this scenario are as follows:

• To create a secure connection between MyCompany and Electronic Customer support through MyCompany's point-to-point dial-up ISP
• To automate customer support through Electronic Customer Support and services
• To enable Electronic Customer Support to create an electronic hardware and software service information of MyCompany's system
• To permit Electronic Customer Support to send software fixes and updates to MyCompany over the network

Details

The following figure illustrates a connection from MyCompany's system to Electronic Customer Support through an ISP connection.

Configuring Universal Connection

• IBM Navigator for i launches the Universal Connection wizard to configure the connection. This only needs to be done once unless some configuration information needs to be updated.

Using Universal Connection

When a Service Application wants to use the Universal Connection to communicate with IBM the following will occur:

• If the connection to your ISP is not currently active, the specified profile is started to allow connections to the Internet.
• The service application attempts to establish an HTTP (if the service application provides its own encryption) or HTTPS (if the service application uses SSL) connection to IBM. If an HTTP or HTTPS connection cannot be established, the service application attempts to establish a virtual private network (VPN) through your ISP and the Internet to a VPN gateway at IBM.
• The service application communicates with the appropriate IBM servers to perform the requested service.

Prerequisites and assumptions

The prerequisites for enabling Electronic Customer Support over a point-to-point ISP connection include the following items:

• Ensure that the IBM Navigator for i programs exist on your personal computer.
• Ensure that you have installed all of the latest HTTP Server and Java PTF groups.
• Ensure that TCP/IP is active. You can start TCP/IP through the Start TCP/IP (STRTCP) command.
• Ensure that you have security officer (*SECOFR) authority with *ALLOBJ, *IOSYSCFG, and *SECADM special authorities in your IBM i user profile and *USE authority to WRKCNTINF in order to configure the connection using the Universal Connection wizard.
• Ensure that the IBM TCP/IP Connectivity Utilities for i (5770-TC1) licensed program is installed.
• Ensure that the Digital Certificate Manager (DCM) (5770-SS1 option 34) licensed program is installed.
• If you are using an internal modem, such as the 56 Kbps modem that is provided with the 9793 adapter card, ensure that the network attribute MDMCNTRYID is set appropriately. You can check this value with the Display Network Attributes (DSPNETA) command. If this value is not set correctly, change this value with the CHGNETA command. This allows the account user ID and password to be stored on the operating system.
• Ensure that the profile used to connect to your ISP have been previously configured.
• Ensure that a TCP/IP route is associated with the ISP profile that will route the Universal Connection traffic to your ISP. In most situations, the default route will work.

Current system configuration steps

After you complete the prerequisites, you are ready to begin configuring the Universal Connection through the wizard.

Assuming that TCP/IP configuration already exists and works, complete these steps to set up the Universal Connection if you connect to Electronic Customer Support through MyCompany's local system.