Category: Technical Articles
-
Be the Exception. Become an IT Monitoring Hero.
Today’s businesses must be available 24/7 with fewer people having to manage more complex systems and processes. IT departments receive a constant bombardment of information from a diverse variety of operating systems, business applications and critical processes and support a complex array of servers and devices running across their entire network. To monitor every application…
-
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 /…
-
USB Flash Drives and IBM i
USB Flash Drives, thumb drives, memory sticks, call them what you may, are pretty much everywhere these days and it is a little known fact that you can use them with your IBM i server at no cost. Support was added for these devices for POWER 7 / 8 servers from IBM i v7.1 TR6…
-
Using PHP and RPG to Communicate Together Part 2
This is the second part to my article about PHP and RPG communicating together. If you missed the first part, it can be found here. Last time we discussed PHP calling, and using, the power of RPG. This time let us switch things around and show you how easy it is for RPG, or any…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Tech tip: finding AIX’s save buttons
If there’s one thing that I will never get used to about Google Docs, it is that it doesn’t save your changes. Or rather, it does it for you. Well, Mr Google, I want the “save” button back. Even if it doesn’t do anything. There is something very consoling about a save button. It’s closure.…
-
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…