A slightly pretentious title for an article that doesn’t deserve it, but you must indulge yourself every so often. If you’ve ever used the PING command from a windows command line I imagine you’re familiar with the -t option that will leave it running until you have the information you want. I found myself needing…

DSPIFSLCK and the profile that would not delete Mixing a little of promoting useful utilities with my frustration when I can’t get something to work. To set the scene, I’ve been trying to remove an old developer profile from one of our production machines. For whatever reason every time I try to delete it I…

A cautionary tale that I’m sure many of you will never have to deal with, but if it stops one person pulling out quite as much hair as I did then it can’t be all bad. One of the bits of maintenance I can normally get my customers to agree to, even if they’re a…

I’m reminded of an essay I wrote at school “I believe I have no beliefs”, as a good coder I’m sticking to a naming convention! This is a slightly different take on something I’ve seen discussed in various forms, including on the IBM site here: https://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=nas8N1013520 It’s suggested that you look at last sign-on date,…

  A question that crops up from time to time since the paperless office never materialised. Another variation is ‘I asked for a print but didn’t get it, where did it go?’ This is one of the first things that got me to look in detail at the audit functionality on IBMi, maybe not the…

For those of you who have a customer that just stopped checking the calendar before the turn of the millennium or really likes the good old-fashioned two character device IDs you’ll sometimes need to update data in a very awkward format. If your data is in a format that UPDDTA can’t read it then perhaps…