Author: Steve Bradshaw
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Deleting Old Spool Files – DLTOLDSPLF
OK, so nobody likes tidying up, not at home, not in the office and certainly not on their computers. How many spool files are there sitting on your system right now that deserve a “Long Service Award” because of the amount of time they’ve been in your company? It’s a pain I know, removing spool…
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Automatic PTFing
I was once asked by a good friend “if I could change one thing about IBM i users what would it be?” I know, I have some strange friends, trust me this is not even close to the weirdest conversation I’ve had with this particular bearded Irish individual, but enough of that right now, back…
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What is eating my IFS?
The most common question I get about disk usage is about the IFS, specifically “what is using all the disk space allocated to it?” Most recently I was asked this question during a PTF install by the good people of RPL in Telford. So, thanks to them for putting food on my table and I…
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Detecting Damaged Objects
With IBM i being as robust as it is, for most of us damaged objects are a rare thing but the problem is that they tend to turn up at the most inopportune moments. So, in this article I wanted to share a little known tool called areVerify that IBM created to detect damaged objects…
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Reclaim DB Cross-Reference (RCLDBXREF)
As we all know, DB2 for i is pretty darn tough and is rather good at both healing and optimising itself but every now and again you need to give it a little helping hand. One example of this is the need to run a repair command to fix one or more of the Database…
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IBM i 7.3, little things mean a lot
Much has been spoken about the key new features in IBM i 7.3 that it’s really easy to overlook some of the smaller new features, some of which can be really useful. To quote Edith Lindeman, these “little things mean a lot!” So in this article we explore a few of the smaller features that…
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Say Hello to IBM i 7.3
Last week saw both the announcement and shipping of IBM i v7.3, just three days apart, this statement in itself tells you something about the new management style of the IBM i team, as in years gone by it would have taken weeks if not months to get from announcement to shipping. This slicker, faster…
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ObjectConnect – Using SAVRSTLIB
More of us than ever find ourselves working on more than one system. There are a whole range of reasons for this. Quite often we have separate LPARs on the same physical server for Development and Production or perhaps separate physical servers for High Availability solutions to replicate our Business Critical Environments or maybe like…
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Zipping / Unzipping IFS Objects in IBM i
Those of you who know me probably know that I’m a lapsed programmer. These days I spend most of my time working at or below the IBM i Operating System layer but every now and then there is an exception that makes me dust off my coding skills and the recent need to Zip /…
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USB Flash Drives and IBM i
USB Flash Drives, thumb drives, memory sticks, call them what you may, are pretty much everywhere these days and it is a little known fact that you can use them with your IBM i server at no cost. Support was added for these devices for POWER 7 / 8 servers from IBM i v7.1 TR6…
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Did IBM just offer you a FREE HMC?
OK, so maybe it’s not 100% free, but with the launch of the new Virtual Hardware Management Console (vHMC) the cost of the acquisition for many folks has tumbled by as much as 80% to a point where it’s almost as good as free. IBM have announced the long awaited offering, which allows you to…
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Goodbye Waldemar Puk – You will be missed. Tributes from friends and colleagues.
I was honoured to be asked to speak at last month’s Common Conference in Poland. I say “asked” but that’s not quite how it works. What actually happened was a conversation with Waldemar Puk (Waldek as I know him), Waldek would then start talking about the golden future of IBM i, the way we can…