PowerWire Editor

Technical Articles

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

News

New research: Legacy applications threaten digital transformation initiatives for IBM i shops

Only 37 per cent of respondents have a clearly designated person or team with responsibility for retiring legacy systems PETERBOROUGH, NH – July 09, 2019 – 67 per cent of survey participants admit to keeping legacy IT applications running simply because the historical data they hold is still useful according to new

News

IBM’s Steve Will talks AS/400, POWER9, IBM i 7.4, cognitive systems, and everything in between.

True or False: The IBM i operating system is just the AS/400 all over again. False! The AS/400 provided a solid foundation, but it has evolved over the years into the entirely new technology that we call IBM i. The 2019 chapter in our journey from AS/400

Featured

Node Project - iDash

In this article I will take you through part of my Node.js workshop that I presented at the UK International i Power conference in June 2019. The workshop was called ‘From Zero to Production with Node.js’. I hope those that attended enjoyed the workshop and found it beneficial.

IBMi

HMC's - descriptive errors optional

I’ve been having great fun recently trying to upgrade one of my HMCs and figure I shall now share with you all the woes in the hope that the next person to have this problem can find the solution a little easier. If you read all the way through

Press Release

ARCAD and Skytap announce global partnership to deliver DevOps for IBM i in the cloud

ANNECY – 25 June, 2019 – ARCAD Software, international leader in DevOps and Modernization solutions, today announced their partnership with Skytap, global cloud provider delivering an industry-first, multi-tenant public cloud offering for IBM i. The new partnership targets the modernization of legacy IBM i toolchains by making the ARCAD for DevOps solution

News

Fresche Solutions and CSI Partner to Bring IBM i Applications to the Cloud

Thursday June 6, 2019 – In a bid to deliver higher economic impact, reduce cost and increase innovation for clients, enterprise performance partner CSI has partnered with Fresche Solutions (Fresche), a provider of IBM i modernisation solutions, to unblock access to the cloud for IBM i applications. CSI’s unique private

News

IBM i Conference in the UK

i-UG’s International i-Power is the largest IBM i Conference of the year in the UK and they will have a whole host of topics to choose from, looking at many key aspects of today’s IBM i installations. Here are just some of the topics being covered this year…

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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

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Programmers Comments

This is a light hearted article this month while I prepare for my Node.js on IBM i workshop at the UK International i Power conference 2019. Over the 40 odd years I have been programming, I’ve come across some fantastic comments in source code.  They certainly make code

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‘i’ will emPOWER the new generation of techs

For as long as I can remember, the Holy Grail of IBM i computing has been to engage with the younger generations and to bring them into the safe and secure IBM i fold; and it has been a tough journey. Until now! This just got a whole lot easier!

News

The 2019 Common Europe Congress

The 2019 Common Europe Congress adds IBM experts to agenda including the latest announcements and education on OS 7.4 and Db2 Mirror; Luxembourg, Europe; 20 May 2019.  The Common Europe Congress (CEC), a technical association event centered around IBM i technology, has newly added more world-known IBM experts to

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IBM i Security Best Practices – Presented by Jeff Uehling

Security best practices and regulatory compliance are a constantly moving target. In this webinar, Syncsort’s Product Management Director for Security Solutions, Jeff Uehling, shares what he’s learned over the past 30 years regarding IBM i security best practices. Key topics include: * Why you need to run at security

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Raz-Lee Security Announces ICAP Client for iSecurity Anti-Virus

iSecurity Anti-Virus has been enhanced to support the new ICAP Client. With this solution, the actual virus scanning is performed outside the IBM i, by organizational servers. This solution is important for organizations with multiple LPARs (logical partitions), especially if these LPARs are using parts of a processing unit. ICAP,

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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

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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

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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

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i-UG’s International i-Power is back and this time it’s bigger than ever!

International i-Power is returning to Milton Keynes on the 11th & 12th June and this year the agenda is the largest it has ever been! Continuing with the great success in 2018 the System i-Developers (SiD for short) team are returning this year to deliver lectures to developers who work

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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

Technical Articles

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%

User Groups

Community Matters

Communities or User Groups are a great source of education as well as networking opportunities with experts and your fellow peers, if you are not part of one you should be, here’s an example why. I attended a User Group meeting organised by i-UG (UK) in February and was

News

48 Hours in POWER

There is a great Travel Guide to IT Transformation that IBM Power Systems are presenting where you can virtual travel around the globe and visit companies / organisations that are employing POWER Systems to deliver technology solutions that are quite honestly ‘eye opening’, and at the end of each short story

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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

IBMi

Disable on Date

Speaking to some of my colleagues on Microsoft products (and using sufficient holy water to cleanse afterwards.) I was told that Active Directory has a tickbox to disable a profile on a given date. After a lot of searching I concluded that we don’t have that on IBMi until

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IBM i: The Most Amazing IBM Product We Have Heard Of

Today I read an article in eweek about IBM i from a reporter who had attended the IBM Think 2019 conference in San Francisco, encountered IBM i for the first time and thought he had stepped into an alternative universe. It was a nice article to read because it was