IBMi

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

IBMi

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

IBMi

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

IBMi

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

Press Release

ARCAD releases Azure DevOps integration for all-in-one CI/CD automation on IBM i

New ARCAD for DevOps release enables rapid automation of IBM i application build and deploy within any existing Azure DevOps toolstack Peterborough, NH and Annecy, France – 7/12/2020 – ARCAD Software, international leader in DevOps and Modernization solutions, today announced the integration of its IBM i (aka iSeries, AS/400)

IBMi

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

IBMi

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

IBMi

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

IBMi

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

AIX

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

IBMi

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

IBMi

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

IBMi

Cloud Walkers bring new tools to IBM i administrators

Cloud Walkers s.r.o is a new company that has been set up by Bartlomiej Grabowski who is an IBM Champion, their aim is to bring new tools to IBM i administrators, and at the moment their tools are called LPARKit. Below is the detail that PowerWire.eu received

Featured

New Software Enhancements for POWER Systems

PowerWire.eu talked to Brandon Pederson earlier this month about the Software Enhancements for POWER System. PowerWire.eu (PW):      Hello Brandon, it’s nice to talk to you again, the last time we spoke back in April, Covid-19 was disrupting all our plans, cancelling all our conferences, and making us

IBMi

i-UG's November event goes Hybrid

i-UG’s final event of 2020 will be on Tuesday 10th November, known as their i-Power Midlands event and will be FREE to attend to all attendees. Normally i-Power Midlands is an in-person event held at the Mount Hotel in Wolverhampton, but with the current Covid-19 restrictions and government advice/

IBMi

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

IBMi

Keep My NodeJS App Running!

In my previous article, we created a quick weather app running on our favourite server. In this article, I will show you how we can ensure this application is always up and running, and if it’s not running, get it to automatically restart. Node applications are different to say,

IBMi

More fun with Ansible for IBM i Messing about with Ansible for i modules

In this article I decided to make use of a number of the Ansible for i modules to demonstrate their use for more usual day to day CL related tasks. A word of warning before I start. The playbook I’ve developed is relatively long and contains all the variables

IBMi

Leaving SEU behind part 2

For those who don’t remember, or are new to the newsletter, last year I did an article on ILEditor as a way to start to bring my code writing into the 21st century. I also mentioned in the article that there was a new version, ILEditor 2, in the

IBMi

A Weather App on IBM i

Back to Node.js on IBM i for this one! In this article, we will be creating a quick weather app running on our favourite server. Once we have this up and running, in the next couple of articles we will be enhancing it to integrate with our existing applications

IBMi

Using Ansible with IBM i to install PTFs

In my previous article I introduced you to using the ibm.power_ibmi Ansible collection from IBM. I showed how to connect to your IBM i LPAR and vary on and off a device. Whilst that is mildly useful I wanted to write about something slightly more complex and, arguably,

IBMi

POWER 9 G Models

IBM has recently announced a new version of the POWER9 scale out servers, these are the entry level servers that make up the P05, P10 and P20 Process Group ranges.  If you’ve been paying attention to the past server announcements, you would be excused for assuming this was a

IBMi

Forgetting to recompile - check your dates

Something I mentioned on twitter a little while ago, I had a problem where someone had changed a source member but not recompiled it. As it happens they took out a line of code that the customer was quite keen on, so when 10+ years later the next poor sap

IBMi

A screen a story – it is in the details

A good quiz question for this article could have been: “When was the Index Advisor introduced?”. When searching the Internet I could find information going back to V3R6, which was released back in 1995. I think it is fair to say, we have all heard about it, but unfortunately we

IBMi

Windows Terminal & IBM i

Still continuing my theme of having a break from Node.js. This time we are looking at the new Microsoft Windows Terminal, also known as WT. And what a great product it is. We will be taking a look at how to use the new Microsoft Windows Terminal to automatically