Category: Technical Articles
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Finding Save Files and Freeing Up Disk Space on IBM i
“Finding Save Files” might sound like a Disney “Straight to TV” sequel to “Finding Nemo” but no, it’s much more pleasurable than that 😉 Few of us enjoy tidying up after ourselves in our home life and in my experience, even less of us like to do it in their IBM i work life. In…
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Hello Maria!
Hello Maria! – I can’t say that without sounding like Leslie Philips – showing my age again! One of the cutting-edge recent additions from IBM for their Open Source offerings is Maria DB. In my opinion, this is a great addition, and will open the IBM i to even more applications than are readily available…
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The modern way to check your IBM i PTF levels
In the good old days before Covid (remember them) finding out where you were with your PTF levels was a laborious task. You had to manually compare the PTF groups installed on your system with the IBM Fix Central web site and note the level of each group. If the level on your system was…
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Ansible AIX Introduction
In previous articles I dabbled with IBM’s Ansible modules for IBM i. Whilst I will definitely be using those in the future I thought I’d take a look at the Ansible modules for AIX too. There are fewer AIX modules than IBM i at present and many of these are NIM related. Whilst most AIX…
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Bye Bye NodeVer!
For those of us using Node.js on our IBM i, you are probably aware of an Open Source utility, provided by IBM, called NodeVer (Is that Node Ver? or is it Nod Ever?, I’ll leave it with you to call it whatever you like!). NodeVer was a great utility allowing you to have more than…
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Last signon date – set it yourself
Something that came up recently and jogged my memory for a tweak I made a few years ago. I was asked to confirm if a user had logged into a profile, now on the face of it a nice simple question and answer. WRKUSRPRF <username> and return the date I get on the screen. The…
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Three reasons to look at INZTAP in a different light
The use of tape with IBM i is still truly ubiquitous, and yet virtually no one pays any attention to the way that the tapes are prepared. Whether we are taking about GDPR secure data wipes, backup data integrity or identifying backup time, then INZTAP is a great tool to have in your tool kit.…
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Keep My NodeJS App Running!
In my previous article, we created a quick weather app running on our favourite server. In this article, I will show you how we can ensure this application is always up and running, and if it’s not running, get it to automatically restart.Node applications are different to say, PHP applications, where we have the Apache…
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More fun with Ansible for IBM i Messing about with Ansible for i modules
In this article I decided to make use of a number of the Ansible for i modules to demonstrate their use for more usual day to day CL related tasks. A word of warning before I start. The playbook I’ve developed is relatively long and contains all the variables and tasks in one yaml file. IF I were…
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Leaving SEU behind part 2
For those who don’t remember, or are new to the newsletter, last year I did an article on ILEditor as a way to start to bring my code writing into the 21st century. I also mentioned in the article that there was a new version, ILEditor 2, in the works. This was released earlier in…
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A Weather App on IBM i
Back to Node.js on IBM i for this one! In this article, we will be creating a quick weather app running on our favourite server. Once we have this up and running, in the next couple of articles we will be enhancing it to integrate with our existing applications already running on the IBM i.…
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Using Ansible with IBM i to install PTFs
In my previous article I introduced you to using the ibm.power_ibmi Ansible collection from IBM. I showed how to connect to your IBM i LPAR and vary on and off a device. Whilst that is mildly useful I wanted to write about something slightly more complex and, arguably, more useful. The ibmi_fix_imgclg module allows you…