Maybe not quite the worst, but I imagine there’s a good selection of better ones, something to keep in the back pocket though. I originally wondered about this when I got to a customer site to do a full system save and their tape drive was acting up, fortunately I got it going again but […]
Logical File – more than the sum of its parts
An interesting problem I came across recently, completely self-inflicted as these things often are so hopefully a cautionary tale to avoid others repeating it! I was investigating disk space usage on a customer server, trying to figure out if they could do some housekeeping or if it was time for them to invest in some […]
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 […]
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 […]
Forgetting to recompile – check your dates
Something I mentioned on twitter a little while ago, I had a problem where someone had changed a source member but not recompiled it. As it happens they took out a line of code that the customer was quite keen on, so when 10+ years later the next poor sap came to amend the program […]
QMGTOOLS – Local update server
I mentioned in the last article an issue with one of my partitions that I’m not allowing onto the network proper. One of the challenges this gives me is making sure I keep my software up to date, when I’m used to running a command to dial out. Specifically I’m talking about the Must Gather […]
Telnet failure – check your encryption
One that I’m not sure I want to admit how long it took me to find the answer, so I figure instead I’ll tell you all a story and hopefully it’s one more link out there with the solution. A bit of background, for one of our customers we have a utility to handle passthrough […]
Backup the backup of your backup
It may sound like we’re getting into some sort of recursion error, but I like to think of it as the poor mans VTL, Virtual Tape Library, and something you can try at home (I assume most of us are working at home right now.) A little bit of background, most of my customers are […]
Everyone needs a hobby – Maths on IBM i
First of all, credit to Simon Hutchinson @ RPGPGM.com and the article ‘Calculating prime numbers in RPG’ for reminding me of this. 8 years ago, when I was first learning RPG (and had slightly more hair than I do now, not sure if those two factors are related!) I decided to test some of what […]
CLEANMAIL – the folly of assumption
Bit of a short one this month as preparing for Year End tasks and shutdowns around the customers, but it gave me a little chuckle when I did it so maybe I can warn some people off the same fate! CLEANMAIL, if you aren’t familiar, is a utility from IBM that’s useful for removing old […]