Category: Technical Articles
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A screen a story – PM400 and the day after (30th September 2020)
The term “IBM Performance Management for Power Systems” does most likely not immediately ring a bell, my guess is “PM400” does. It was offered for free and as a Dutchman, after I hear the word “free”, you have my attention. PM400 was a service offered by IBM for free, performance reports accessible from a Website…
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More – What is eating my IFS?
Warning :- The main SQL statement may run for many minutes. In my case just over 1:30 elapsed and 35 CPU seconds, but I only have 222,000 objects in my IFS on a Power 9. I have run the QSRSRV (see below) on a Power 7+ with around a million objects in the IFS and…
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PDF Direct Printing from IBM i
What happens when you want to print a PDF from IBM i via a regular IBM i writer and output queue, where do you start with that? Let’s face it, there is no native PRTPDF (Print PDF) command in IBM i. Well, this was the question I received the other day and I was delighted…
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SQLite and a Node API
my previous article, we went through how easy it was to call a Twitter API, searching for a string and storing that tweet in a SQLite database stored on the IBM i using Node.js. Before we get around to analysing the records we have stored over the last month or so, we need a method…
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IBM i Security – Duct Tape & String
Having recently watched the Helpsystems annual State of IBM i Security study, along with listening to Robin talk about it on the Incredible i Show, it seemed a good time to reflect on how I originally got introduced to the need for security. As the title suggests my solution at the time was a bit…
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Configuring ACS Printer Emulation
Before I say another word on this, I have to declare that I personally feel that using ACS to run a Printer Emulation should be considered as a last resort. It is great for Home Working, enabling you to print on your own printer when connected to the office via a VPN. It is relatively…
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A screen a story – time to unlock yourself
We humans are creatures of habit, and of course some of these are bad habits. I am no judge here as I have my own set of habits too, good and bad, just ask my wife! As you may know, I am from the Netherlands and in my country, we have a TV commercial which…
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SQLite – Store Tweets
In my previous article, I revealed how easy it is to use an open source database called SQLite on our IBM i server. If you need a refresher, that article can be found on the link here. In this article, I’ll show you all how easy it is to use this lightweight database. Including it…
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IBMi password – pick a number
We’ve all been there, the password expiration has come around (QPWDEXPITV) and you’re struggling to think of a new one that matches the password rules on your system. One day I decided “screw that, the system can pick for me”. Thus I started tinkering in NodeJS, as mentioned in previous articles I’m not a GUI…
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Easily Control that runaway job using IBM i Workload Groups
How to limit high CPU jobs easily If you have any jobs or users that, every now and then, manage to impact the system by using a large amount of CPU, this trick may help. There is a catch! This method only limits jobs that have more than 1 thread. A single thread job will…
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SQLite – What is that?
In this article, I’m going to show you another database option we now have on our IBM i. All these choices! Little did we think we would have any alternative for a database, we expected only to have the excellent DB2 for i. So, what is it? SQLite is a serverless database, self-contained and is…
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Convert Spool File To PDF or Text File
On most systems I work on there are simply far too many spool files. Spool files are no doubt a useful source of information but what is also in no doubt is that spool file maintenance is one of the last tasks on anyone’s agenda. However, on every system there are spool files which are…