The AS/400 Can't Send a Slack Message. I Made It.

Here's how I fixed that with Node.js, TypeScript, and n8n. IBM i is remarkably reliable. That reliability is also the problem. Because nothing breaks often, nobody builds proper alerting. Then something does break, nobody notices for three hours, and you're explaining to a client why their invoices didn't go out. The first time I tried to connect to one of these systems from a modern Node.js service, the connection just hung. No error, no timeout, nothing. Turns out I had the wrong port and the IBM i firewall was silently dropping packets. That took longer to figure out than I'd like to admit. The system has no native webhook support. No push notifications. No modern alerting primitives. What it has is DB2, SFTP, message queues, and job logs. That's enough. The Architecture The idea is simple: a small TypeScript service polls the IBM i system on a schedule, checks for failure conditions, and posts to an n8n webhook when it finds one. n8n handles the routing, the notification, and the a