Using the Postcard applications

You can verify a local installation (which does not have any communication links with other WebSphere® MQ installations) by using the Postcard applications that are supplied with WebSphere MQ.

You can also use the Postcard applications to verify communication between your machine and the machine of another named user, where that machine is running WebSphere MQ and using TCP/IP. Therefore, you can use the Postcard to verify that you can communicate with another server. To use the Postcard applications for this type of verification, either both machines must be in the same cluster or you must configure channels to communicate between the two machines. You can use the Postcard applications with existing queue managers, as long as both queue managers belong to the same cluster.

To ensure that both machines are part of the same cluster, you can do either of the following:
There are two Postcard applications. The MQI Postcard uses MQI (Message Queue Interface) to send and receive messages and the JMS Postcard uses JMS (Java™ Message Service) to send and receive messages. The Postcard applications look very similar and work in a similar way. They are used to verify different aspects of the WebSphere MQ installation.
Note:
  1. To use the JMS Postcard you must have a working JRE (Java Runtime Environment).
  2. If you want the JMS Postcard to use font and color settings different from the Java Virtual Machine defaults, you need to change the postcard.ini file. For more information see WebSphere MQ Using Java..

To use the Postcard applications to verify a local installation, see Using the Postcard applications to verify a local installation.

To use the Postcard applications to verify a server-to-server installation, see Using the Postcard applications to verify a server-to-server installation.