Category: Technical Articles
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How to find the right IBM i printer configuration
You might think that we live in a world of standards and that any printer would be able to work out of the box with any server. Well sadly, you would be wrong. Whilst this would be the easiest thing in the world to achieve, the one thing that is consistent about all the worlds…
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A screen a story – A Better way to Retire the Heritage Navigator for i
Let me cut right to the chase, if you have read or have not the article of last month titled: “A screen a story – Retire the Heritage Navigator for i”, forget about it. If, however you do not have the option to apply PTFs in the short term and you are concerned about this…
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How Can You Update Your UAK Key without an HMC?
I was working at a customer last week when I noticed the system attention light was illuminated on their Power 9 Server. Looking at WRKPRB (work with problems) log, the SRC code was A7004761 which is the code for an expired Update Access Key (UAK). What is a UAK? If you are wondering what a…
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NCDU on IBM i
Yes, I am continuing my amazing journey with open source on the IBM i. In this article I’ll be taking a look at another one of the open source utilities that has slipped under the covers… This time it is NCurses Disk Usage, or NCDU from now on. This is a disk storage utility, with…
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A screen a story – Retire the Heritage Navigator for i
Although the log4j media storm of December 2021 has settled and is part of what we call the past. IBM did publish a document titled Security Bulletin: IBM i components are affected by CVE-2021-4104 (log4j version 1.x) When looking at this document you will find a section called “Workarounds and Mitigations”, in there you can…
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Service Commander on IBM i
In this article I will talk about another great open-source utility for our IBM i. Firstly, what a great name! Service commander was developed by Jesse Gorsinski, the business architect of open source on IBM i. The github repository for Service Commander can be found at https://github.com/ThePrez/ServiceCommander-IBMi Check-out this repository, not only to see the…
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A screen a story – Storage Spikes?
As mentioned in my previous article, this article is all about when disk space spikes all of a sudden and how to trace the culprit. The last few year more and more of my tasks have moved from 5250 emulation to Run SQL scripts. So finding the reason why disk space suddenly spikes is no…
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Logrotate on IBM i
In this article I will talk about an open-source utility that hasn’t got much airspace since it was released on our IBM i. Its called logrotate, a handly utility that can help us manage the many logs we have on our IFS. As we all know, log files can easily get out of hand. How…
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Your IBM i server is not a fridge
It feels a little crazy to have to point this out but your IBM i isn’t a bloody refrigerator! And yet, there are some users who seem to think that you can treat IBM i as they would a fridge, namely they turn it on when it’s shiny and new and just leave it running…
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PostgreSQL on IBM i
In this article I will show you how we can install and use the very popular PostgreSQL database on our IBM i. PostgreSQL is an open source relational database management system, a DBMS developed by a worldwide team of developers. It has been around since 1986 and now available on the IBM i. Install To…
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A screen a story – Custom Charts. Is it a hidden gem?
If disk space fills up completely on IBM i, the system will eventually come to a stop. Before doing that it will get slower and slower. It is your task as a system administrator to prevent that from happening, In the past I have seen a wide variety of monitoring software keeping an eye on…
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A screen a story – now you see me, now you do not
The life of a system administrator can be full of surprises. Things you have taken for granted, turn out to be completely different. Let me get directly to the point. All jobs being started on IBM i are logged in the history log, right?If you want to know the answer, you need to read on.…