The history of indicators pre-dates even the earliest versions of RPG and takes us all the way back to the old tabulating machines, perhaps even earlier depending on how broad a definition one uses. What is without doubt, though, is that indicators in the sense of *INnn and *INLR were introduced to the RPG language as a vehicle for translating those old tabulator board programs.

RPG has grown a lot since those early days, and yet many people still write code using the old-style numbered indicators. LR? Well, we’re kind of stuck with that, but there hasn’t been a need

I’m scheduling cache battery replacement for my production machine. Since this machine is never off-line, do you have any best practices or recommendations for how to change these batteries while production is running?

–Ben

Due to a recent United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) change, changing the cache batteries on your IBM i partitions isn’t as easy as it used to be, especially on a production machine. Here’s what happened.

IBM uses batteries in its disk controllers to provide disk drive caching. The batteries have a useful life of about 2.75 to 3 years and the system will

Many IBM i shops have problems with eternal users. Eternal users are user profiles previously used by former IBM i power users that are still on the system. Although these users have left your organization, you can’t delete their user profiles, because the profiles are used in IBM i functions used to run batch jobs. This week, let’s look at eternal users and how to weed them out of your system.

How The Gotcha Gets Ya

Eternal users happen when administrators use their own or other power user profiles for submitting batch work to the system. Batch jobs are frequently