Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Use Wireshark To Diagnose IBM i Communications Problems
March 5, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreTroubleshooting communications problems is akin to dealing with teenagers. There’s plenty of room for blame and finger-pointing, and resolving a problem sometimes seems impossible. I don’t have anything to help you with teenagers, but I can recommend a free tool for communications problems. It’s called Wireshark, and here’s how to use it with IBM i communications traces.
First, visit www.wireshark.org to get Wireshark. It is a network protocol analyzer that runs under Microsoft Windows and several operating systems of the Unix flavor. Like the best things in life, Wireshark is free.
Next, install the QSPTLIB library. This is a library
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IBM Offers Flex System Bundle Down Under
March 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are shopping for Flex System iron down under in Australia or New Zealand, then IBM has a deal for you. Or, more precisely, it has two deals for you because it treats the two countries differently because they have different currencies.
The deal is called the Innovate on IBM Flex Systems and Save Bundle, and you can get the details about the Australian version in announcement letter A314-022 and the New Zealand one is in announcement letter NZ314-022.
The deal is only available for Flex System bundles with Xeon-based nodes and are aimed at supporting virtualized servers
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IBM Makes More Room In The Catalog For Power8 Stuff
March 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs generally happens before a big product launch, IBM is gradually winding down sales of earlier generation Power Systems processor cards and various peripherals and giving resellers and customers ample warning that it will stop peddling certain products.
In announcement letter 914-047 dated February 25, a bunch of things were ripped out of the Power Systems catalog with two different effective dates. On May 2, a bunch of routing indicators for Power Cloud Integrated Solutions, PureApplication, Smart Analytics Systems, and Balanced Warehouse Solutions are being withdrawn. I haven’t the foggiest what this means, and I am pretty sure you don’t
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Proprietary And Unix Systems Decline In Q4, X86 Up A Smidgen
March 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLet me start by saying that I did not create the language that is used in the computer business, particularly in the server racket, with a few exceptions. I don’t like the terms “proprietary,” and I don’t like the terms “industry standard” as if all of the customers and vendors got together and created a non-proprietary machine. Best I can figure, the X86 architecture is still pretty much ruled by Intel and Windows was still the dominant operating system on X86 machines.
It is with this in mind that we go over the final quarter of server sales for 2013
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IBM Layoffs Begin In The U.S. And Canada
March 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSeveral weeks ago, IBM started a round of layoffs that it hopes to have completed by the end of the first quarter and from which it will book approximately $1 billion in charges. The next round of layoffs were expected to start on February 26, last Wednesday, but the rumors are that CEO Ginni Rometty was giving a big speech at the Mobile World Congress to talk about creating mobile Watson applications and the PR machine did not want to step on that story. So layoffs started in the United States and Canada on February 27.
Under normal circumstances, as
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Power Systems Coming To The SoftLayer Cloud
March 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM did not just buy public cloud SoftLayer last year because it needed to acquire a customer base and revenue stream to bolster its efforts to sell cloud-based infrastructure and software services. Big Blue bought SoftLayer to get a unique set of skills and operational experience in running clouds, which is distinct from the system and application outsourcing business in which IBM is already an expert. Perhaps the expert.
SoftLayer is a lean-and-mean operation, and has built up a fleet of over 120,000 servers in 13 datacenters. The machines have minimalist designs and come from motherboard and whitebox server maker
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Auto-Answering Record Lock Errors And More On Returning An IBM i Box
February 26, 2014 Hey, Joe
… Read moreMy Power i system is driving me crazy with RPG1218 record lock messages. Because of the way one of our applications was written, we receive RPG1218 messages several times a day. The record lock only lasts a minute. When we enter a retry on the locked record, the system is always able to update the record. Is there any way to auto-answer these record locks?
–Bert
Well the first thing I’d do is have your applications staff figure out why that program is causing so many record locks and fix it. (Ha.) Barring that, I may have a solution that
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The Case Of The IBM Systems Director And RBAC
February 26, 2014 Jeff Waldbillig
… Read moreIt was a dark night on a network that knew how to keep its secrets. Actually, that was last night. Today was going to be a busy day working on the network that knew how to keep its secrets. I’d been temporarily moved from my nightshift role at the help desk to the daylight hours to cover for a coworker who was out with an extended illness, but I was beginning to wonder if my late-night auction surfing had attracted some attention I did not need.
My phone rang, and I paused for a moment as I considered that this
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Nevermind About That Power, Mainframe Microcode Contract
February 24, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreRemember the contractual change that IBM put out a year ago, which was locking down access to licensed internal code for System z mainframes, Power Systems, and various storage arrays based on Power7 machinery? Fohgettaboutit, as we say in nearby Brooklyn.
In announcement letter 113-027 from last February, Big Blue said it had revised the terms and conditions to machine code on these machines, making it not only explicit that licenses to machine code cannot change hands, but that they may not do so without a customer signing a license acceptance agreement. The changes were supposed to go into
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IBM Cuts A PureFlex Deal With Service Providers
February 24, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreManaged service providers who are looking to build public clouds based on Power Systems and X86 servers can now get PureFlex machines from IBM at a significantly reduced price.
The discount deal, which is detailed in announcement letter 314-017, is similar to a deal IBM gave to MSPs back in December 2012 for various Power Systems machines, including Power-based blade servers. The BladeCenter machines are basically in mothballs now, and have been replaced by PureFlex converged infrastructure. And thus the new MSP deal is focused on PureFlex machinery and the systems software that runs on it. This includes both