The collective brain trust here at IT Jungle expends a lot of its intellectual and emotional energy on watching the ecosystem of customers who use the progeny of the venerable AS/400. Many of you have been using IBM midrange systems since the days of the launch of the System/38 back in the late 1970s and you have been long-time users of the systems for nearly a decade when the AS/400 made its debut on June 21, 1988, and when this platform made good on the name International Business Machines.

You will have to forgive me for still being in

Here it is, the top three things most unlikely to be seen in the IBM midrange community: Frank Soltis wearing a beanie with a propeller on top; Big Blue handing over IBM i to the open source community; and a freshly minted IBM i user group. The first two are pretty much out of the question, but the last scenario, I’m here to tell you, is happening not once, not twice, but three times. And you thought pigs would fly before a new local user group would put out a welcome mat.

We don’t keep birth rate statistics on IBM

When an auditor comes into your IBM i shop, chances are good he will check that processes are in place to control source code. But all too often, your underlying source code will not match up correctly with the program objects that actually run in production, indicating a process problem. A free new tool from Rocket Software called iAudit is designed to help IBM i shops identify this divergence of source code and object before the auditor comes around.

Regulatory audits are once again on the rise. Whereas the Sarbanes-Oxley Act enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal at

Yale has many impressive graduates, including Eli Whitney, who declared, “Keep your cotton-pickin’ hands off my gin.” The university has also wrapped sheepskin around less admirable characters, including a father and son who conned first America and then Britain into trusting their wrongheaded but likely heartfelt beliefs. We are, of course, referring to Elisha and Benjamin Perkins, doctors who promoted quack medical apparatus. Their saga shows what a minefield medicine can be, even for a great institution like Yale. And then there’s the colchicine story. Dr. Watson of IBM, mind the gaps!

The former fame and subsequent

Just how big of a mistake is it to do nightly backups? Depends what your definition of big is. If a disaster takes down your system at the end of a working day, but before the scheduled backup occurs, how much data will you lose? You probably don’t have an accurate answer to that question. But if you knew, it might change the way you think about how data loss would affect your business.

Most pros who think about data loss and loss prevention have implemented disaster recovery plans, even though the majority of them have little or no idea