Sign up for PUB400

To write and run RPG code, you need an IBM i to connect to. You don’t have one. IBM doesn’t sell a desktop version. Cloud providers offer IBM i, but it’s enterprise-priced and not where you want to start.

PUB400.com is a free, public IBM i server that has been running since 1999, maintained by Holger Scherer in Germany. It exists for exactly this purpose: people learning IBM i. Over 70,000 users have passed through it over the years.

What you get:

• A personal user profile with PGMR-level access
• Two private libraries — your code and data live here
• 500 MB of disk storage
• Full access to RPG, CL, SQL, COBOL, and open-source tooling (including Node.js)
• The current OS — IBM i 7.5, running on real Power hardware

What you can’t do:

• Commercial workloads — this is for learning only
• Create more than one account per person
• Install licensed program products that aren’t part of the base

What to do

Go to pub400.com and follow their signup process. Their site walks you through it; we won’t duplicate their instructions here because they maintain them and we don’t.

A few things to capture as you go, because you’ll need them in Chapter 5:

• Your username (user profile name)
• Your password
• The hostname for SSH connections (it’s pub400.com)
• The port (standard SSH — 22)

Read their terms carefully. They’re brief and reasonable, and they keep the service sustainable for everyone.

When you’re done

You have a PUB400 account, you’ve noted your credentials, and you can keep moving. Next up: Chapter 3: Install VS Code.