Those of you who have suffered from an unexpected cache battery failure (SRC nnnn8008) will know how much pain it can cause. Whilst there is never any danger to your data, in many cases the performance of your server can be reduced by a factor of ten! So this month I thought I would show […]
IBM i SNTP – Automatic Time Adjustment
Last month I wrote about how you could get your IBM i to automatically adjust its clock for Daylight Saving Time adjustments, this month we take it one step further and see how its trivial to get your clock to keep itself in sync constantly with other services on your network using SNTP Simple Network […]
Corporate Inertia
Resistance. Inertia. It’s hard to understand why people don’t do what they know they should be doing. This inertia isn’t just for people who really need to go to the gym or stop losing hours on Facebook. There’s also such a thing as Corporate Inertia. When you’re introducing some IT solution which will address a […]
RPG 2017 Updates
During the latest round of IBM i Technology Refreshes, TR2 for version 7.3 and TR6 for version 7.2 enhancement, IBM also introduced three enrichments for RPG. These changes will be released as individual PTFs, around the April 2017 timespan, as with the Technology Refreshes. Let us take a look at these. These are: Nested data-structures […]
IBM i Daylight Saving Time Management
Spring is on its way (Halleluiah!) and next month the clocks with be springing forward an hour. As a boy (and the youngest of my clan) I remember it was always a job given to me to go around the house and change the dozen or so clocks that we had around the place. Nowadays […]
IBM i 7.3 – Authority Collection Services
One of the great new functions IBM has built into IBM i as standard, and free of charge in 7.3, is the Authority Collection Services. This works a little like the performance collection services, in that you start it for one or more users to monitor access to objects in one or more Libraries or […]
Application Runtime Expert – Worth a Look?
IBM recently announced that their product, Application Runtime Expert (ARE) for IBM I, is now free of charge, along with a host of other products. The IBM announcement can be found here if you are interested. ARE is a licensed program, 5733ARE, which will work on any IBM i Version 6 or above. It was […]
Deleting Old Spool Files – DLTOLDSPLF
OK, so nobody likes tidying up, not at home, not in the office and certainly not on their computers. How many spool files are there sitting on your system right now that deserve a “Long Service Award” because of the amount of time they’ve been in your company? It’s a pain I know, removing spool […]
RPG – What’s New in 7.3
As you probably know, IBM released 7.3 of the IBM i operating system in April 2016. So now it has been over six months since the new release, let us take a look at what has changed in RPG for this release. Remember that SEU has not been updated since Version 6.1 way back […]
Automatic PTFing
I was once asked by a good friend “if I could change one thing about IBM i users what would it be?” I know, I have some strange friends, trust me this is not even close to the weirdest conversation I’ve had with this particular bearded Irish individual, but enough of that right now, back […]