Category: Technical Articles
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Ping unto eternity
A slightly pretentious title for an article that doesn’t deserve it, but you must indulge yourself every so often. If you’ve ever used the PING command from a windows command line I imagine you’re familiar with the -t option that will leave it running until you have the information you want. I found myself needing…
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DSPIFSLCK and the profile that would not delete
DSPIFSLCK and the profile that would not delete Mixing a little of promoting useful utilities with my frustration when I can’t get something to work. To set the scene, I’ve been trying to remove an old developer profile from one of our production machines. For whatever reason every time I try to delete it I…
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Use the Beaver!
Use the Beaver! In this article I will show you how we can use beneficial plugins to enhance our RDi environment. If you find the Run SQL Scripts limited in its functionality, not being able to prompt SQL statements, no auto-complete etc, then the Beaver may be for you! DBeaver is free and open source…
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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 the last year senior IBM executives have described “The…
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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 to agree to, even if they’re a…
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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% performance boost that is free…
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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 have been working on this…
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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 but nevertheless, they have a…
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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.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=nas8N1013520 It’s suggested that you look at last sign-on date,…
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“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 on IBMi, maybe not the…
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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 Commander is a very helpful graphical…
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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 UPDDTA can’t read it then perhaps…