Category: Technical Articles
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My source is MIA – RTVCLSRC
A bit of a follow on to my article in July last year about checking the date of source against your program. I have a customer who for their sins continues to run a V5R4 partition, part of the reason for this is if you run ANZOBJCVN you’ll kill a small forest with the number…
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Should we strive to improve our code?
Last week, I was looking for “CPF2234 Invalid Password” messages, for a program I am writing. I assumed that I would find them in QSYSOPR, but there weren’t any. So, I tried DSPLOG and there they were. “Oh no”, I hear you say, “Why are you using 5250 Green Screen?”. I will admit that I…
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Finding Non-Encrypted Connections to your IBM i
Connecting securely to our systems is more important now than ever before and this is just as true for IBM i as any other platform. As I’m sure you know you can encrypt your connections to IBM i at no extra cost and there have been many articles written on how to set this up.…
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Man – Where’s that Manual Gone?
IBM has released quite a few big hitters lately, MariaDB etc., and some of the not so well known utilites have slipped under the cover. Let me take you through one of them in this article. This great utility stops you being told to RTFM (Read the manual)! So this is where this open source…
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A screen a story – IBM i Services (SQL) to the rescue
Friday 29th January 2021 I am in a Teams meeting which is drawing to an end, when the phone is ringing. A quick text message is the response, telling the caller that I will call back within 10 minutes. The moment I prepare myself for calling back, another customer is calling. This call takes some…
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Lock System Values
Stay Safe! If you’re looking to tighten your IBM i security, it can be quite daunting to know where to start. Do you look at securing the perimeter by looking at an exit point solution, or do embark on lengthy object level security project? Or both?! A quick win for many could be preventing the…
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A screen a story – time to update the settings of your IBM i SMTP server
Let us face it QDLS is something of the past, back from the days when the Integrated File System (IFS) had not seen the light of day. If you have not yet abandoned using QDLS now is a good time to do so. I will not go into details, but knowing that OfficeVision and QDLS…
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Using IBM i Services To Manage User Profiles
Managing user profiles on IBM i can be an onerous task. For those with larger systems user profiles can run into the thousands. As the person responsible for managing this crucial element of the system doing this through the green screen and reports sees you reading through the report looking for the exceptions to whatever…
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Why did that NetServer User get disabled?
What do you get the SysAdmin who already “has everything” for Christmas? Well, I asked Santa Scott (or maybe I should call him “Forstie the Snowman”) for yet another IBM i Service that would make my life easier. Note: Thanks to my good friend and i-UG colleague Will Holland for the Festive Sign On Screen. #IBMiAwesome!…
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SAVE21 to the IFS – Worst Idea Ever
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…
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RSync – Better than Copy (CP)
In this article, I’ll be taking a look at an open-source utility that doesn’t get as much credit as I feel it should. If you have followed my open-source articles here and at the i-UG user group meetings, you will often have to copy files from one IFS directory to another. Yes you can use…
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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…