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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

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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

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IBM i Dashboard

In all of those cool computer control rooms you see in the movies, there is always some simple screen that the technician looks at when there is a problem. Admittedly this computer techie is not normally the hero of the movie, nor are they usually the most dashing of characters

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When usage is not usage - Inactive user profiles & devices

I’m reminded of an essay I wrote at school “I believe I have no beliefs”, as a good coder I’m sticking to a naming convention! This is a slightly different take on something I’ve seen discussed in various forms, including on the IBM site here: https://www-01.

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"Where did this print come from? How I learned to love the audit journal"

A question that crops up from time to time since the paperless office never materialised. Another variation is ‘I asked for a print but didn’t get it, where did it go?’ This is one of the first things that got me to look in detail at the audit functionality

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Fifth Annual IT Marketplace Survey Reveals Ongoing Reliance on IBM i to Support Critical Business Needs

HelpSystems announced today that its fifth annual IBM i Marketplace Survey Results reveal not only that the IBM i platform continues to be a top choice for IT professionals, but also that investment in the platform is growing. More than 750 IT professionals from around the world participated in the

News

A10 NETWORKS THUNDER® CONVERGENT FIREWALL SELECTED FOR 5G NETWORK DEPLOYMENT

A10 Networks Thunder® Convergent Firewall selected for 5G network deployment by major Japanese mobile carrier Theale, UK. – 9th January, 2019: A10 Networks (NYSE: ATEN), a leading provider of intelligent and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced a major Japanese mobile carrier has selected the A10 Thunder® Convergent Firewall (CFW) Gi/SGi

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Midnight Commander

IBM is doing such a great job on the Open Source front, it’s difficult keeping up with all their offerings as of late.  That’s not a complaint, keep going IBM! Another great example of software being added to that list is Midnight Commander – what a great name! Midnight

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The Joys of System36 – Update your flat files via SQL

For those of you who have a customer that just stopped checking the calendar before the turn of the millennium or really likes the good old-fashioned two character device IDs you’ll sometimes need to update data in a very awkward format. If your data is in a format that

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Do I need to pay for Java?

Over the last few months, you may have noticed some rather confusing messages about the need to pay for Java. They imply that you need to pay to use Java if you are a business, and in some cases this will be true but in most cases you will NOT

News

Bring simplicity and affordability to HA with PowerHA for IBM i

System stability is one of the main reasons that IBM i continues to be a force in the market almost 30 years after the launch of the AS/400. Over the years, many anecdotes have circulated about i machines continuing to support the core business despite floods, fires or even

News

IBM i: Reflections on Mirroring

Every organisation running its core business on IBM i, regardless of size, must be able to keep its system and business application up and running during planned and unplanned outages, caused by events like application failure, data corruption, power outage or extreme weather events. Depending on the criticality and size

News

Potential Impact on Processors in the POWER Family

On January 31st, IBM announced that its POWER family of processors are potentially impacted by the vulnerabilities popularly known as “Spectre” and “Meltdown”. These vulnerabilities do not allow unauthorized external parties to gain access to a machine, but they could allow a party that has access to the system to

News

Gain the power to reduce TCO and serve the business better

Fresh challenges and opportunities are constantly emerging in the digital economy, however disruptive competitors are appearing just as fast. To compete in this new world, enterprises need IT systems that offer high levels of flexibility, can generate rapid insight from large and fast-growing volumes of structured and unstructured data, and

News

IBM and Red Hat Join Forces to Accelerate Hybrid Cloud Adoption

Companies expand collaboration to target hybrid cloud sector through technology and services integration. SAN FRANCISCO – RED HAT SUMMIT – MAY 8, 2018 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) today announced a major expansion to their long-standing relationship, which will enable IBM and Red Hat customers to benefit from

News

IBM i professionals reveal security and compliance concerns with legacy enterprise applications

New survey by SoftLanding® Systems outlines key barriers that stop IBM i shops retiring legacy applications PETERBOROUGH, NH – October 16, 2018 – 63 per cent of IBM i users in a new survey reveal their organizations are keeping legacy IT applications alive – either on IBM i or other platforms – because the

News

2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey

Last year, nearly 650 IBM i users from around the world shared information that gave our community a better understanding of the state of the IBM i platform. The results led to many insightful conversations about the future of the technology so many rely on. With this year’s survey,

Press Release

ARCAD releases new Codechecker module to guarantee software quality and reduce DevOps risk

Peterborough, NH and Annecy, France – 16 September 2018 – ARCAD Software, leading vendor in DevOps and Enterprise Modernization solutions for IBM i, today announced the release of a new module in its DevOps suite: ARCAD-CodeChecker, for continuous source code quality analysis. ARCAD-Codechecker is a static code analysis engine designed to continuously

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Open Source Package Management

To follow on from my PowerWire Open Source on IBM i theme, this time I would like to run through Open Source Package Management with you all. So, what is Package Management? Firstly, let us step back and run through how we typically manage our software on the IBM i.

News

LANSA Raises Bar for Low-Code Software Development with New Release of Visual LANSA

London, UK —31 July 2018 — LANSA (www.lansa.com), the original low-code vendor, has announced a major new release of its software development platform, Visual LANSA. This raises the enterprise app development bar by delivering the ability to build scalable mobile, web and desktop applications significantly faster than before. This