IBMi Say Hello to IBM i 7.4 Say Hello to IBM i 7.4 It’s time to meet the new kid on the block, as IBM announces the latest version of IBM i. IBM i 7.4, announced today and generally available from June 2019. The arrival of 7.4 in 2019 is no surprise, for
IBMi Old solutions causing new problems - DSPFD and RGZPFM A cautionary tale that I’m sure many of you will never have to deal with, but if it stops one person pulling out quite as much hair as I did then it can’t be all bad. One of the bits of maintenance I can normally get my customers
Technical Articles Free Performance boost for POWER8 & POWER9 Servers Anyone fancy a free performance upgrade? Well if you are running a POWER8 or POWER9 and your firmware is up to date, you may just be able to get a performance increase by changing a single setting in the Hypervisor. This is not an April Fool, it a free 10%
IBMi Open Source Updates To continue my series of articles on Open Source on the IBM i. A couple of months ago I wrote a PowerWire article on how we should now be managing, and keeping up to date, our open source, which can be found here. For those of you, like myself, who
IBMi IBM i Dashboard In all of those cool computer control rooms you see in the movies, there is always some simple screen that the technician looks at when there is a problem. Admittedly this computer techie is not normally the hero of the movie, nor are they usually the most dashing of characters
IBMi When usage is not usage - Inactive user profiles & devices I’m reminded of an essay I wrote at school “I believe I have no beliefs”, as a good coder I’m sticking to a naming convention! This is a slightly different take on something I’ve seen discussed in various forms, including on the IBM site here: https://www-01.
IBMi "Where did this print come from? How I learned to love the audit journal" A question that crops up from time to time since the paperless office never materialised. Another variation is ‘I asked for a print but didn’t get it, where did it go?’ This is one of the first things that got me to look in detail at the audit functionality
IBMi Midnight Commander IBM is doing such a great job on the Open Source front, it’s difficult keeping up with all their offerings as of late. That’s not a complaint, keep going IBM! Another great example of software being added to that list is Midnight Commander – what a great name! Midnight
IBMi The Joys of System36 – Update your flat files via SQL For those of you who have a customer that just stopped checking the calendar before the turn of the millennium or really likes the good old-fashioned two character device IDs you’ll sometimes need to update data in a very awkward format. If your data is in a format that
IBMi Do I need to pay for Java? Over the last few months, you may have noticed some rather confusing messages about the need to pay for Java. They imply that you need to pay to use Java if you are a business, and in some cases this will be true but in most cases you will NOT
IBMi Open Source Package Management To follow on from my PowerWire Open Source on IBM i theme, this time I would like to run through Open Source Package Management with you all. So, what is Package Management? Firstly, let us step back and run through how we typically manage our software on the IBM i.
IBMi Removing the storage bottleneck This article is sponsored by Northdoor. The theoretical peak performance of IBM® Power Systems™ servers continues to rise rapidly with each new generation of hardware, but any system is only as good as its weakest element. In many organisations, end-to-end performance is throttled by bottlenecks in data storage and retrieval.
Technical Articles Selling your expertise You’re brought in to help because you know something that they don’t. You’ve got a world of experience and an old-school, belts-and-braces approach that makes it much less of a risk for a project if the company has you around. Now, the very fact that—to them—
IBMi Node is Weird! Firstly, thanks to all that attended my Node.js on IBM i workshop at the International i Power conference in June. Once again, a great event, meeting up with old friends and colleagues. Well done to the organisers. In this article I intended giving you a quick introduction to Node.
IBMi What JDK 9 means for your Terminal Emulator What is JDK 9 and why does it matter? JDK stands for the Java Development Kit and the 9 refers to the version of it which was released on September 21st 2017. Oracle have stated that as JDK 9’s September release they will be removing support for the Java
IBMi Goldilocks and the RPG Developers My partners, Jon Paris and Paul Tuohy, and I participated in i-UG’s i-Power event in 2016 and in similar events with i-UG in past years. It’s always great to meet and work with fellow IBM i developers in the UK. Traditional i-UG events offer a series of 45-minute
IBMi A Netserver SMB Alternative? Has your organisation been hit with the file sharing SMBv1 being disabled? Can you no longer share files on our servers IFS, as Microsoft is now blocking this protocol? Server Message Block (SMB) is the method used on the IBM i to share files and printers and commonly known on
Featured Don’t have a Meltdown over Spectre You would have to be living under a rock not to have heard about the latest class of security vulnerabilities that have been found. These are known by the catchy names of Meltdown and Spectre. Now those of you who know me (and my love of patching servers) will be
Featured RDi 9.6 – Push to Client Feature To continue with my current stream of Rational Developer for i articles, in this issue, I will show how to use a feature that makes administration easier, I’m all for that! How many times over the years have we opened a PMR with IBM on RDi, or all the
Featured RDi 9.6 – Worth a Look? Firstly, thank-you to all that attended my RDi session at the last UK iUG meeting. I hope you enjoyed it. At that presentation, I notified all that IBM were due to release Version 9.6 of RDi on the 16/11/2017, which replaces RDi version 9.5.1.2
IBMi Time to say bye bye to 7.1 “Alas, poor 7.1! I knew him, Horatio: an O/S of infinite Roch-est, of most excellent Resili-ancy: he hath borne me on his back-up a thousand times”. OK so I confess that is quite possibly the most painful Shakespeare kludge I have ever read too. If you can do
Featured DB2 Field Procedures - Testing In my last article, I wrote how we can encrypt sensitive data in our DB2 database. To recap; IBM has given us the ability to take a field, or column, and let us apply security, or encryption, to that field/column. It is up to your FieldProc program to perform
IBMi Wanna Use SMB v2 If you need NetServer you need the last from IBM i. Netserver (the IBM i Service that allows you to map a network drive) and QNTC (the ability to read and write to a Windows Share directly from your IBM i) have been around so long now it’s hard
Technical Articles Legacy Application Mobility, is the Answer Surprisingly Simple? The significant benefits of mobility were highlighted in a recent Microsoft paper. The paper went further than most, stating some quantifiable bottom line benefits for mobile application access; claiming that mobility “leads to 30% improvement in processes and 23% more productivity – and 100% more satisfied employees”. This enthusiasm and willingness
Technical Articles How LinkedIn helped me bypass the gatekeepers Every couple of days, I’ll get a question like: “What’s the trick to getting noticed on LinkedIn?” Or else: “You seem to have cracked the code. What’s the hack?” Or this (my favourite): “Anthony, you’re everywhere!” No, I’m not everywhere, and there is no hack,
