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Category: Technical Articles

  • PRUV Tool

    Upgrading your system to a new release of IBM i can be a worrying process with many items to check before taking the plunge. The IBM Pre-upgrade verification (PRUV) tool can help with this process by checking through all the IBM mandated pre-requisite tasks before you start the actual upgrade. This can give you peace…

  • VS Code – An OSS IDE

    In my previous articles on IBM i Open Source, I’ve briefly mentioned Microsoft Visual Studio Code.  So, in this article, let me show you what it’s all about. What options do we have for editing our source/applications that reside on our IFS? IBMs RDi (Eclipse based) Zend Studio (Eclipse based) Notepad ++ 5250 EDTF (Suppose…

  • Node-red on i – 5733OPS not required

    Inspired by Andy Youens series of articles on Node and Open Source on IBMi,  I decided to try setting up Node-red on one of my servers. I’ve also got to give credit to a post on the IBM developer site: https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/i-running-node-red/ The main difference is that where the walk-through uses licensed program 5733OPS I decided…

  • SMBv3 support in IBM i 7.4

    Those of you that spotted my article on what’s new in 7.4 back in April (if you missed it, click here to read it now) may well remember I was quite excited at the prospect of SMBv3 in 7.4.  And yes, I realise just how sad that makes me sound and yet it is AWESOME…

  • Back to the future

    Let us be honest sometimes our / your job as a system administrator is not as varied as we would like it to be. In many cases we have to run commands over and over again with just a small change. When doing this working with a GUI it is not the most efficient way…

  • Ping unto eternity

    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

    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…

  • Use the Beaver!

    Use the Beaver! In this article I will show you how we can use beneficial plugins to enhance our RDi environment. If you find the Run SQL Scripts limited in its functionality, not being able to prompt SQL statements, no auto-complete etc, then the Beaver may be for you! DBeaver is free and open source…

  • Say Hello to IBM i 7.4

    Say Hello to IBM i 7.4 It’s time to meet the new kid on the block, as IBM announces the latest version of IBM i.  IBM i 7.4, announced today and generally available from June 2019. The arrival of 7.4 in 2019 is no surprise, for the last year senior IBM executives have described “The…

  • Old solutions causing new problems – DSPFD and RGZPFM

    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…

  • Free Performance boost for POWER8 & POWER9 Servers

    Anyone fancy a free performance upgrade? Well if you are running a POWER8 or POWER9 and your firmware is up to date, you may just be able to get a performance increase by changing a single setting in the Hypervisor.  This is not an April Fool, it a free 10% performance boost that is free…

  • Open Source Updates

    Open Source Updates

    To continue my series of articles on Open Source on the IBM i. A couple of months ago I wrote a PowerWire article on how we should now be managing, and keeping up to date, our open source, which can be found here. For those of you, like myself, who have been working on this…