u/Pale-Perspective-580

Hey everyone,

With PUB400 currently offline for a week maintenance window, my IBM i practice workflow has completely stalled out.

I’ve spent the last couple of days scrambling to find a replacement just to get some green-screen / SSH compiler access, but I keep striking out across the board:

• Other "Public" IBM i Servers: Searched everywhere for open community systems (like the old PUB1/PUBlib/holger boxes or similar community servers), but none exist or are currently active. PUB400 really seems to be the only one of its kind, so there's no direct drop-in public alternative right now.
• IBM Cloud (PowerVS): Tried to spin up an hourly pay-as-you-go instance, but their payment gateway keeps declining my cards because of cross-border / recurring mandate verification issues with my bank. Can't even clear billing.
• Microsoft Azure (Skytap/Kyndryl): Looked into running Skytap on Azure, but learned that standard trial credits don't apply to third-party marketplace hardware, and the baseline pricing for a dedicated Power partition is way out of budget.
• IBM Academic Initiative: My school isn’t in their pre-approved institution list, so getting manual review approval will take too long to help with this downtime.
• Local Emulation: Looked into QEMU / local virtualization, but with TIMI and VLIC being proprietary, running the actual OS locally is obviously a dead end.

I already have VS Code set up with the Code for IBM i extension locally so I can write code, but without an active box to actually compile (CRTBNDRPG/CRTBNDCL) and test runtime logic, I'm completely blocked.

Does anyone know of any lesser-known public test systems that are currently up, low-cost developer accounts that accept simple payment methods like PayPal, or educational sandboxes?

Is anyone else unable to reach PUB400 over the last 48 hours?

Both the 5250 session and the web portal (pub400.com) are completely unresponsive on my end. Running a ping to the host (213.135.5.156) just returns Destination host unreachable, so it looks like the upstream route at Intersaar is dropping packets before it even reaches the box.

I know Holger usually takes the system down for maintenance/backups on Sundays, but it's been offline across normal weekdays now.

Does anyone know if the box is stuck in an unplanned IPL, running a long RCLSTG / PTF cleanup, or if there's upstream network work going on in Saarbrücken?

Just trying to figure out if it's a known outage or if anyone in touch with Holger/RZKH has heard anything.