• Admin Alert: Readers Check in on Four Simple Rules for PTFs

  April 4, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  After posting my March 21st article on Four Simple Rules for PTF Management, I received so much good information from our readers on PTFs that I decided to pass it along in this follow-up column. Here’s some additional tips and techniques on PTF management that might make it easier to apply PTF fixes on your IBM i machines. Q: When does IBM refresh a Cume PTF package? A: Never Reader Richard Shearwood wrote in with this piece of information about whether IBM corrects cumulative PTF packages containing bad PTFs after the package is released. IBM never refreshed a cume

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• A Couple of RSE Quickies

  March 28, 2012 Paul Tuohy

  Believe it or not, there are a few features of RSE that I do not use on a daily basis. When working on my own system, my own projects, and my own development environment, I know where everything is and how to navigate it. But (and I know you are going to find this hard to believe) there are some people who do not share my views on such things as where sources should be kept and, even more shockingly, I have to adapt to their standards when I am working on their systems. Is there no justice? Here are

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• Down with Dependence!

  March 28, 2012 Ted Holt

  ACME Software has just released version 1.0 of the DWIM (Do What I Mean) utility. Placing the DWIM command in your CL programs (or calling the program counterpart from programs written in other languages) will solve all your problems, because the computer will stop doing what you tell it to do and do what you intended for it to do instead. Before you start adding calls to DWIM to your programs, you might want to ponder a few questions. What if ACME Software goes out of business and stops supporting DWIM? What if a competitor comes out with something even

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• Just When Do IBM i PTFs Get Applied, Anyway?

  March 28, 2012 Hey, Joe

  Our management has our operators apply cumulative PTFs (CUME) with no regard to when the system will be IPLed. They load the CUME, and the system may not be IPLed until a few weeks later. The managers believe that no PTFs are applied until after the IPL. I think that some PTFs are applied immediately, while others wait for the IPL. What’s the real story on how PTFs are applied? –Dave This is an interesting question. For most shops, PTFs aren’t usually applied until you IPL the system. But in some situations, eligible CUME PTFs can be applied immediately, depending

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• Sharing In V6

  March 21, 2012 Jon Paris

  Some time ago I read Ted Holt’s Guru tip Sharing Simplifies Source Code in which he showed an approach to building reports in a modular programming environment. At the time I can remember thinking that it would be interesting to see how V6 RPG’s ability to pass files as parameters might offer an even simpler approach. Simpler, that is, once you know how to pass files as parameters! Well, it has taken me almost a year, but I finally got round to working on it, and I confess I rather like the results. Ted’s original approach required that a driver

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• *NOMAX Does Not Mean Infinite Capacity

  March 21, 2012 Hey, Ted

  The practice in our shop has been to set the initial size of physical files to what seems to be a reasonable value. In many cases, we leave the size at the default value of 10,000 records with three increments of 1,000 records each. Sometimes we change one or more of these values, usually the first one. Someone has suggested that we stop the guesswork and create all files with SIZE(*NOMAX). However, someone else is afraid that a program will go into a loop and fill up the disk space with output operations. Who’s right? –Flora I agree with the

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• Four Simple Rules For IBM i PTF Management

  March 21, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  Talking with an IBM Business Partner this week, the conversation turned to PTF management and the best ways for managing cumulative PTFs. Inspired by this talk, I came up with these four simple rules for a good PTF management strategy. Rule 1: Don’t Let Your PTFs Age A lot of shops only apply PTFs when they upgrade their hardware, but many (or most) shops are also frequently upgrading their application software. Frequent application changes can create new processing situations that test the limits of a partition’s Licensed Internal Code (LIC) and operating system fixes. In a rapidly changing applications environment,

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• Commenting Interactive Code

  March 7, 2012 Ted Holt

  The tips I regularly feature in this august publication deal with some aspect of source code syntax. Today I turn my attention to another part of the programming process. I want to talk about a work habit that you might find useful. I would say that everyone who writes any type of source code at all knows the importance of comments, but that would be incorrect. I have followed (and written) too much code that was inadequately commented. Effective comments in source code serve as a great boon to the humans who must read or modify source code. As Ashley

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• Interpreted CL Members

  March 7, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I am thinking of writing a program that will read a source member of CL commands, interpreting them and running them dynamically one at a time. I can think of several situations in which such a utility would be more suitable than compiled CL programs. Before I re-invent the wheel, I want to know if IBM i already has something like that. –Tom Yes, there’s something like that. You can do this sort of thing with input spooling. I’ve only used input spooling on occasion, so I’m not an expert, but I can show you how it works. Create a

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• Admin Alert: Getting Started With An i 6.1 Upgrade

  March 7, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  For the second time in two years, my organization is participating in a multi-partition/multi-machine i5/OS V5R4 operating system upgrade to i 6.1. The second time around is interesting because I can build on lessons from last year’s upgrades. In the hope that it can help you with your V5R4 to 6.1 upgrades, here are some of my notes for planning the upgrades. Deciding Between Upgrading To i 6.1 or i 7.1 With IBM dropping support for i5/OS V5R4 and the fact that Big Blue hasn’t released the i 8.x operating system yet, customers still have a choice whether to

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