Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM’s Systems and Technology Group to Invest Heavily in India
June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreNo, I didn’t take that trip to India to hang with Sam Palmisano, IBM‘s chairman and chief executive officer, but I did catch wind of what Big Blue plans to do in India as it seeks to capitalize on opportunities in the East. To put it simply, IBM might be firing big-time in the United States and Europe–remember the 14,500 layoffs from last summer?–but as far as India is concerned, it is hire, hire, hire.
Palmisano said that IBM has 43,000 employees in 14 cities in India, making it the largest single country aside from the United States to
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Windows Patches Kill Operations Console on V5R3 and V5R4
June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA warning from the OS/400 community: According to a number of people who applied patches to their Windows machines last week, as Microsoft instructed them to patch on Tuesday, as soon as their patches were applied, the operations console links into their OS/400 V5R3 and i5/OS V5R4 systems stopped working.
Jeff Crosby reported his troubled with “Mikeysoft” patches and operations console relating to i5/OS V5R4 on the Midrange-L user group, while Thomas Hauber reported problems with the Windows Update and the operations console linking into OS/400 V5R3 over at the comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc newsgroup.
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The X Factor: Virtual Server Sprawl
June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is hard to find a server maker who is not gung-ho about virtualization these days. This might seem a bit perplexing, given that one of the main marketing drivers for virtual machine partitioning or logical partitioning on modern servers is that by carving up a physical machine into virtual, dynamic slices, customers can do server consolidation on a grand scale, and in theory reduce their footprints.
Of course, not everyone is thinking about server virtualization in this manner. At data centers in the financial services sector, for instance, IT departments are operating in a business environment where transaction volumes
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OS/400 Shops Share Their Training Experiences
June 19, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts
… Read moreLast week, I explained that many OS/400 shops are preparing for (if not already experiencing) a shortage of trained resources on the platform. As AS/400 and iSeries stalwarts head toward retirement, and colleges are turning out fewer and fewer students who have experience with much other than Windows or Linux systems, users are looking to build their own RPG programmers and system administrators.
In the prior article I examined some of the alternatives that users have for training new programmers to support those business critical legacy systems. This week, I’ll look at what a few users have to say about
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OS/400 V5R3 PTFs Can Corrupt Licensed Internal Code
June 19, 2006 Doug Bidwell
… Read moreUnlike many of you, I spend a great deal of time–some would say an inordinate amount of time–dealing with PTFs for the OS/400 and i5/OS operating systems. And even a techie like me gets burned every now and then. Be careful with Cumulative Group PTF C6101530, which I call “cume” 6101 for short. If you follow the current installation instructions that are online at IBM‘s Fix Central site, you will be OK. But if you follow the instructions that ship with the PTF order, you could in trouble.
The basic problem is that IBM issued from PTFs, and they
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Happy 18th Birthday, AS/400; Time to Leave the Nest
June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn some ways, it is a pity that turning 18 years of age does not, in some ways, give the Application System/400, which is now called the System i, some rights of its own that transcend that of its parent, IBM. When we turn 18 in the United States, we can vote and we can join the military, but we still can’t drink legally, even though a lot of us certainly drink against the law. Maybe it is time for the System i to stand up for itself and, in a very real way, against the way that IT
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Admin Alert: How to Set i5 Library Lists for 5250 and Batch Jobs
June 14, 2006 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreSimilar to the PATH variable in MS-DOS and Unix, every job running on the i5/OS operating system has a library list, which tells the operating system where to locate system objects that the user is requesting. Library lists and how they are generated are basic i5/OS meat and potato issues. Nothing works without them, and it is worth understanding how they are created so that you can manipulate them to your advantage.
The Elements of a Library List
Library lists on the i5/OS and OS/400 operating systems consist of the following four components that, when grouped together, define a job’s
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Avoid Locked Display Files/Resetting Page Numbers
June 14, 2006 Dear Esteemed Professional Colleagues
… Read moreThe following question (minus my editing for grammar) was recently posted on the IT Jungle Forums.
I have a display file that remains locked almost all day by users. If I want to recreate the file, I have to wait until all users log out, releasing the lock. Is it possible for me to recreate the display files while it is locked?
–Kaizad Patel
Those of us who still write and/or maintain green-screen applications (and there are a lot of us) understand Kaizad’s problem. Here’s my reply to him.
You can’t recreate the display file if someone has it
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IBM Offers Contingency Planning Assessment Service for Pandemics
June 12, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTrying to prove yet again that IBM is more than an IT provider and that it has some expertise in dealing with disasters, Big Blue last week announced a new consulting and technology service to help companies deal with a potential flu pandemic.
A cynic might say that there is no disaster that a clever company like IBM cannot and will not exploit for profit. But, to be fair, while the immediate potential of a flu pandemic is somewhat remote, the amount of disruption that such a pandemic might cause to business and our personal lives is no doubt potentially
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MKS Says Business Is Booming Enough to Give Dividends
June 12, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreCanadian software change management vendor MKS reported its financial results for its fourth quarter and year end for fiscal 2006 last week, and business is so good that the company has instituted the practice of giving investors dividends.
MKS had sales of $12.6 million (U.S. dollars, not Canadian) in its fourth fiscal quarter ended April 30, which was up only a smidgen from the same quarter last year, and its application lifecycle management (ALM) software sales declined by 2 percent to $10 million. The company brought a mind-bogglingly large $6 million to the bottom line, an increase of over 256