My company has been playing around with PHP for a while. We are now designing real applications that we will deploy through our own Web server. What security ramifications do we need to consider in our design?

Thank you for your question.

Four aspects of PHP need to be considered to deal appropriately with security design in PHP applications:

1. PHP architecture on i5/OS
2. Web server application security design and configuration
3. Built-in PHP i5_* and db2_* functions
4. Your current object level access control methodology for i5/OS resources

The i5/OS PHP architecture consists of two Web server instances–the PHP core engine running

Over the years, much has been published in the AS/400 and System i community about how to execute remote commands on a PC from a 5250 emulation session using a variety of homegrown or IBM utilities. Most of the methods I have seen presented are good but require a fair bit of knowledge for installation, port numbers to open for the Windows XP firewall, calling an API from a high-level language program to retrieve the emulator workstation’s IP address and the like.

For those who use Windows and iSeries Access (now System i Access) or IBM‘s Personal Communications (PCOMM)

My shop recently added 12 new disk drives to our i 550 development partition. While we outsourced the install to IBM, I found that there were a number of things I could do before and after the process to help the installation run smoothly. To share that knowledge with you, this week I’m presenting five things to think about when adding disk drives to a system.

Five Tips In A Nutshell

To help a disk drive installation run more like a gazelle and less like a hippo, I’ve found that the following five items can make a big difference.

I had a great time at COMMON last week in Nashville, Tennessee. I saw some old friends and met a lot of nice people. I listened to some great presentations put on by some very intelligent people, and that means I have some new tips that I can pass along to you. Here’s a tip from IBM‘ers Jarek Miszczyk and Tom McKinley.

Today’s tip: Don’t put DDS-defined logical file names in your SQL statements.

To understand why, let me give you a little background. When you execute an SQL command, the system determines the best way to carry out

I’ve already published three performance tips from one of your fellow subscribers, a consultant who has found these techniques to be helpful. Here’s tip number 4.

Our friend’s advice: “Use journal cache support.”

Journal caching is similar to file buffering. Caching directs the system to cache journal entries in main storage before flushing them to disk. You do not get journal caching automatically. It is a separately chargeable feature of i5/OS.

The performance advantage is like that of buffering files. Normally the system writes a journal entry to the journal receiver before continuing with the next I/O operation. Caching allows

Last week, I visited the annual COMMON user group conference in Nashville, Tennessee, to see what’s new and upcoming for administrators with the new V6R1 i5/OS operating system. While others have been covering the broader changes to the operating system, this week and next I’ll focus on some smaller changes that will affect the fine art of administering a System i box.

Before I begin, I would like to note that all the information contained here comes from available information about the new release as well as information I picked up at COMMON from IBMers and various System i experts.