Category: Technical Articles
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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…
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Finding Save Files and Freeing Up Disk Space on IBM i
“Finding Save Files” might sound like a Disney “Straight to TV” sequel to “Finding Nemo” but no, it’s much more pleasurable than that ???? Few of us enjoy tidying up after ourselves in our home life and in my experience, even less of us like to do it in their IBM i work life. In…
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Hello Maria!
Hello Maria! – I can’t say that without sounding like Leslie Philips – showing my age again! One of the cutting-edge recent additions from IBM for their Open Source offerings is Maria DB. In my opinion, this is a great addition, and will open the IBM i to even more applications than are readily available…
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The modern way to check your IBM i PTF levels
In the good old days before Covid (remember them) finding out where you were with your PTF levels was a laborious task. You had to manually compare the PTF groups installed on your system with the IBM Fix Central web site and note the level of each group. If the level on your system was…
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Ansible AIX Introduction
In previous articles I dabbled with IBM’s Ansible modules for IBM i. Whilst I will definitely be using those in the future I thought I’d take a look at the Ansible modules for AIX too. There are fewer AIX modules than IBM i at present and many of these are NIM related. Whilst most AIX…
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Bye Bye NodeVer!
For those of us using Node.js on our IBM i, you are probably aware of an Open Source utility, provided by IBM, called NodeVer (Is that Node Ver? or is it Nod Ever?, I’ll leave it with you to call it whatever you like!). NodeVer was a great utility allowing you to have more than…
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Last signon date – set it yourself
Something that came up recently and jogged my memory for a tweak I made a few years ago. I was asked to confirm if a user had logged into a profile, now on the face of it a nice simple question and answer. WRKUSRPRF <username> and return the date I get on the screen. The…
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Three reasons to look at INZTAP in a different light
The use of tape with IBM i is still truly ubiquitous, and yet virtually no one pays any attention to the way that the tapes are prepared. Whether we are taking about GDPR secure data wipes, backup data integrity or identifying backup time, then INZTAP is a great tool to have in your tool kit.…