PowerWire Editor

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IBM i on IBM Power Systems the next ten years of innovation

Join Northdoor and IBM to celebrate the innovations in both IBM i and Power Systems.  As we approach the launch of POWER10, we will discuss the next generation and how clients can take advantage of new hybrid cloud offerings and we will talk about the future roadmap of IBM i.

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Removing drives from guest partitions

“You’ve not done a lot during lockdown, so it’s time to trim the fat.” Technically words from my GP, but I figured perhaps I could apply it to my partitions as well! To set the scene, I want to do a system save of a Power7 with the

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A screen a story – to include or to filter

Once in while an ad hoc job ends up on your desk. A while ago I had such a day, although the disk space usage was around 70 %, the backup of the Integrated file System (IFS) part of the system was consuming more and more time every night. The decision

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Who is using that IFS object?

Sometimes the simplest of questions that come into our support desk can fill us with dread and before the advent of IBM i Services, finding out which job had a lock on a particular IFS object was definitely one such question. Back in the olden days we would have to

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Interview with Mike Ryan, Chairman of i-UG. What have they been doing over the last 12-months? and what to expect at their event next month!

PowerWire (PW): – Hello Mike, its nice to chat to you again, the last time we spoke was in Spring last year when the pandemic first broke out and i-UG where rearranging their annual conference, International i-Power, to a virtual format.  A lot has happened since then, and I think most

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IBM Champion Tweets

As you will hopefully know, in my last few arcticles for PowerWire, I have been writing about retreiving tweets and storing them in a SQLite database on the IBM i. I have a scheduled job on my IBM i that finds the tweets that have the hash tag #IBMChampion. Now

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A screen a story – PM400 and the day after (30th September 2020)

The term “IBM Performance Management for Power Systems” does most likely not immediately ring a bell, my guess is “PM400” does. It was offered for free and as a Dutchman, after I hear the word “free”, you have my attention. PM400 was a service offered by IBM for free, performance

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More - What is eating my IFS?

Warning :- The main SQL statement may run for many minutes.  In my case just over 1:30 elapsed and 35 CPU seconds, but I only have 222,000 objects in my IFS on a Power 9.  I have run the QSRSRV (see below) on a Power 7+ with around

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PDF Direct Printing from IBM i

What happens when you want to print a PDF from IBM i via a regular IBM i writer and output queue, where do you start with that?  Let’s face it, there is no native PRTPDF (Print PDF) command in IBM i. Well, this was the question I received the

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SQLite and a Node API

my previous article, we went through how easy it was to call a Twitter API, searching for a string and storing that tweet in a SQLite database stored on the IBM i using Node.js. Before we get around to analysing the records we have stored over the last month

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IBM i Security - Duct Tape & String

Having recently watched the Helpsystems annual State of IBM i Security study, along with listening to Robin talk about it on the Incredible i Show, it seemed a good time to reflect on how I originally got introduced to the need for security. As the title suggests my solution at

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Configuring ACS Printer Emulation

Before I say another word on this, I have to declare that I personally feel that using ACS to run a Printer Emulation should be considered as a last resort.  It is great for Home Working, enabling you to print on your own printer when connected to the office via

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A screen a story – time to unlock yourself

We humans are creatures of habit, and of course some of these are bad habits. I am no judge here as I have my own set of habits too, good and bad, just ask my wife! As you may know, I am from the Netherlands and in my country, we

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SQLite – Store Tweets

In my previous article, I revealed how easy it is to use an open source database called SQLite on our IBM i server. If you need a refresher, that article can be found on the link here. In this article, I’ll show you all how easy it is to

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IBMi password - pick a number

We’ve all been there, the password expiration has come around (QPWDEXPITV) and you’re struggling to think of a new one that matches the password rules on your system. One day I decided “screw that, the system can pick for me”. Thus I started tinkering in NodeJS, as mentioned

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Easily Control that runaway job using IBM i Workload Groups

How to limit high CPU jobs easily If you have any jobs or users that, every now and then, manage to impact the system by using a large amount of CPU, this trick may help.  There is a catch!  This method only limits jobs that have more than 1 thread.

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IBM Power Systems Enhances Hybrid Cloud Capabilities with Red Hat

New pre-configured private cloud platform, innovative cloud-consumption payment model, and more Red Hat software now supported on IBM Power Virtual Servers BM (NYSE: IBM) announced availability of Red Hat software on IBM Power Systems as well as new IBM Power Systems hardware. These announcements further expand IBM Systems’s commitment

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SQLite – What is that?

In this article, I’m going to show you another database option we now have on our IBM i. All these choices!  Little did we think we would have any alternative for a database, we expected only to have the excellent DB2 for i. So, what is it? SQLite is

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Convert Spool File To PDF or Text File

On most systems I work on there are simply far too many spool files. Spool files are no doubt a useful source of information but what is also in no doubt is that spool file maintenance is one of the last tasks on anyone’s agenda. However, on every system

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Remain Software Milestone

NIEUWEGEIN, Netherlands — Remain Software released today the second Milestone of TD/OMS V13, Gravity V6, Remain API Studio V2, and MiWorkplace V1.25.0. In line with the company’s longstanding commitment to ongoing product and customer support, these new Milestones mark the second of three scheduled enhancements to the

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My source is MIA - RTVCLSRC

A bit of a follow on to my article in July last year about checking the date of source against your program. I have a customer who for their sins continues to run a V5R4 partition, part of the reason for this is if you run ANZOBJCVN you’ll kill

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Should we strive to improve our code?

Last week, I was looking for “CPF2234 Invalid Password” messages, for a program I am writing. I assumed that I would find them in QSYSOPR, but there weren’t any. So, I tried DSPLOG and there they were. “Oh no”, I hear you say, “Why are you using 5250 Green

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Finding Non-Encrypted Connections to your IBM i

Connecting securely to our systems is more important now than ever before and this is just as true for IBM i as any other platform.  As I’m sure you know you can encrypt your connections to IBM i at no extra cost and there have been many articles written

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Man – Where’s that Manual Gone?

IBM has released quite a few big hitters lately, MariaDB etc., and some of the not so well known utilites have slipped under the cover.  Let me take you through one of them in this article. This great utility stops you being told to RTFM (Read the manual)! So this

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A screen a story – IBM i Services (SQL) to the rescue

Friday 29th January 2021 I am in a Teams meeting which is drawing to an end, when the phone is ringing. A quick text message is the response, telling the caller that I will call back within 10 minutes. The moment I prepare myself for calling back, another customer is