Category: IBM i
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The Business Impact of Losing Your Critical System
The more critical a project is to a business, the greater attention it deserves. Which is why it puzzles me that many companies have little or no appetite for discussing the most important IT project of them all: disaster recovery. DR is the set of policies and procedures that will allow vital technology and infrastructure…
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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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Creating and Mapping multiple LUs in SSP
If you’ve read any of my previous articles you’ll know that I’m a big fan of VIOS shared storage pools (SSP). I have been lambasted by a number of IBMers for using SSP instead of NPIV but my arguments are: SSPs are fast and will cope with 95%+ workloads on Power Why continue to use…
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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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Running Open Source PHP Applications
Way back in March last year, I wrote an article for PowerWire.eu that talked about how to get started with PHP on IBM i. In that article I touched briefly on the fact that PHP on IBM i gives you the foundations you need to start using a wide range of open source software. Since…
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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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Using PHP and RPG to Communicate Together
In this article, I wish to take you through how we can communicate between PHP and RPG on our IBM i. I recently had a request from one of our clients asking if I had any examples of calling an RPG program from a PHP script. This gave me the idea, via the PowerWire platform,…
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Using the VIOS VMR for system backups
My previous article discussed how you can upload and load ISO images into the Virtual Media Repository (VMR) to provide virtual optical images to the client LPARs. You may recall that the mkvopt command has an option, -ro, which forces the access mode of the image to read only. When a VMR image is set…
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Test your mksysb backup without NIM or a tape drive
There’s a really handy way of cloning an AIX operating system straight from a mksysb backup. Even if you don’t need to clone an OS, it’s a pretty handy way of testing that your mksysb backup will actually be suitable for rebuilding your AIX root volume group. As you know, the mksysb command creates a…
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Basic AIX performance monitoring for IBM i professionals
IBM Power Systems have the ability to run both the IBM i and AIX (as well as Linux) operating systems, so how can you leverage your existing IBM i performance analysis skills to provide AIX support? Every system, from Charles Babbage’s first mechanical computers in the early nineteenth century to the high-end Power Systems we…
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Tech tip: populating the VIOS Virtual Media Repository
One of the most useful features of VIOS is the Virtual Media Repository (VMR). This allows us to create and import ISO images and then map these to virtual DVD drives on our client LPARs. Most customers will use the VMR to store their IBM i and/or AIX install media and PTFs. Many AIX sites…
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Are IBM i Services the future of systems management?
IBM i Services are perhaps the best kept secret of managing and monitoring IBM i. Relatively few users of our favourite platform know what they are and even fewer use them regularly. This is a crying shame as they are truly remarkable. IBM i Services can tell you in seconds what it takes a skilled…