Category: IBM i
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i-UG’s International i-Power is back and this time it’s bigger than ever!
International i-Power is returning to Milton Keynes on the 11th & 12th June and this year the agenda is the largest it has ever been! Continuing with the great success in 2018 the System i-Developers (SiD for short) team are returning this year to deliver lectures to developers who work on IBMi and POWER systems.…
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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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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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Disable on Date
Speaking to some of my colleagues on Microsoft products (and using sufficient holy water to cleanse afterwards.) I was told that Active Directory has a tickbox to disable a profile on a given date. After a lot of searching I concluded that we don’t have that on IBMi until V7R1 and the USREXPITV/USREXPDATE keywords, cue…
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IBM i: The Most Amazing IBM Product We Have Heard Of
Today I read an article in eweek about IBM i from a reporter who had attended the IBM Think 2019 conference in San Francisco, encountered IBM i for the first time and thought he had stepped into an alternative universe. It was a nice article to read because it was from an ‘outsider’ or to…
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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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Fifth Annual IT Marketplace Survey Reveals Ongoing Reliance on IBM i to Support Critical Business Needs
HelpSystems announced today that its fifth annual IBM i Marketplace Survey Results reveal not only that the IBM i platform continues to be a top choice for IT professionals, but also that investment in the platform is growing. More than 750 IT professionals from around the world participated in the annual survey, which has become…
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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…
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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 need to pay a penny.…