Java MQ Admin Tool - remqsc If you have been struggling with the setting up of your MQSeries environment and don't want or can't afford to buy one of the big administration and monitoring packages that are around, then this simple tool could be a big help to you. Currently designed for MQ Version 1 and 2 (Version 5 support coming soon) under a Unix environment this Java based administration tool should help to ease the creation of your MQ resources. Main Screen The screen shot below (slightly squashed) shows the main screen of the tool with it's 2 display panels. The left-hand one shows the tree of Hosts, Queue Managers and resources that you are working with at the moment, and the right-hand one contains various context-sensitive tabbed panels that show the editable details of the chosen resource. The Tree Display The Hosts and Queue Managers panel is organised as a familiar tree-like format with each host containing it's associated queue managers. Below each queue manager folder are sub-folders for the different types of resource (Queues, Channels and Processes) that you can define and edit. The Queues and Channels sub-folders are further divided into queue types (Local, Remote, Model and Alias) and channel types (Receive and Transmit) so that you can see at a glance what is what. To open or close a folder just double-click on it. To select a resource to edit or, if appropriate, copy, double-click on it too. This will display the current settings for that resource on the tabbed panels. Above the tabs are various action buttons pertaining to the current resource type. The Tabbed Panels The tabbed panels change to reflect the type of resource that is being shown, with text boxes and pull-downs to display the current settings. To update the resource configuration simply over-type the text or change the value of the pull-down and hit the Update button. What could be more simple ? Running the tool You will need to obtain, install and test the Java MQSeries Client pack (available free from IBM) before you can run the tool. During the installation and test of the Java Client on the machine on which you will run the tool, you will also be required to create a channel on the queue manager so that the Java client can connect (you will need to create one channel per queue manager you wish to connect to). Instructions on how to do this are contained within the Java Client pack. There is one pre-requisite MQSeries resource that you will have to create manually (apart from the Queue Manager of course) in order to use remqsc to configure a queue manager, and that is a reply queue for the return of commands to the tool from the queue manager. This is probably best created as a model queue in order to let multiple remqsc sessions connect using the same settings. Configuring the tool To configure the tool for the hosts and queue managers you work on, there is a built in configuration utility that allows you to load and store files containing the addresses, port numbers and names of your MQSeries network nodes. This also allows you to load in configurations specific to particular applications and change the settings without worrying about other nodes in the system being inadvertantly editted. To bring it up click on File and select Edit Config. Hosts are added by right-clicking on Hosts in config file and selecting new from the resulting menu, at which point you will be given a screen to supply the name by which you wish to refer to the host and it's IP-address or DNS name. To specify a queue manager residing on a host you need to right-click on the host and select new from the resulting menu. You will be presented with a further screen, Add Queue Manager into which the details of the queue manager should be typed. All the input fields for this screen are case-sensitive and should be entered with care. If your host has multiple queue managers on it make sure that the values you specify all refer to the same one. Make sure that you type in the queue manager name correctly, any misspelling or incorrect case will result in you not being able to communicate with the queue manager. The communications channel name is the one that you created when first installing and testing the Java MQSeries Client. The port number is dependent upon your queue manager installation, but the default one is 1414. If this number is wrong then you will not be able to contact the queue manager at all. The command queue will be SYSTEM.ADMIN.COMMAND.QUEUE unless it has been specifically changed in your MQSeries installation. You will also have to make sure that the MQSeries Command Server is running for the specified queue manager. It processes the commands for you from the command queue on the host. If it is not running then no commands will be processed at the tool will not work. The reply queue is the one that you created before running the tool as outlined above in Running the tool. Getting hold of remqsc The current source for remqsc and it's associated support classes are available for free here and are supplied as-is.