• PHP-Based Mantis Help Desk Application Coming Soon to the System i

  April 9, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The word on the street is that a commercially supported version of Mantis Help Desk, an open source PHP application that automates some of the tasks that tech support help desks have to do as they deal with end user issues, will soon be delivered on the System i5 platform. The Mantis Help Desk project was created by Bill Van Pelt in 2002 and is distributed under the GNU GPL open source license. Basically, Mantis allows end users to email the tech support team to explain their problem and have that email automatically generate a trouble ticket. You don’t

  …

  Read more

• Zend Issues a PHP Innovation Challenge to i5/OS and OS/400 Shops

  April 9, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Zend Technology, the company behind the open source PHP language, has issued a challenge to OS/400 V5R3 and i5/OS V5R4 shops. The contest that Zend has cooked up will pit OS/400 and i5/OS shops using PHP on the iSeries and System i5 platform against each other to show who can innovate best using PHP. The challenge is only open until April 13 (yes, that’s a Friday, if you are superstitious), so you have better get coding fast and then register your application at the Zend site. IBM and Zend will together judge the submitted PHP applications. The PHP applications

  …

  Read more

• Complacency Will Get You Killed, Security Researcher Says

  April 9, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Think you’ve surrounded yourself with enough security to prevent getting hacked? Think again. Good security practices require you to assume you will be hacked, and places the onus on how you react after the fact, according to a new report written by Mike Rothman, an independent security expert, who cheerfully titled it “The 10 Darkest Truths About Information Security.” Rothman’s paper, which was distributed by the security software firm McAfee, is a chilling reminder that, most of the time, your security provisions will not stand up to hackers, who are out there gunning for people like you and organizations

  …

  Read more

• FTP Means ‘First Try Pinging’

  April 4, 2007 Cletus the Codeslinger

  File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, was obviously designed by academics. While academics are OK people (after all, my editor, Ted Holt, is a part-time instructor at a community college), they are not familiar with what goes on at the factory (like the one where I work full-time). That means that making FTP (and other Unix-type applications) work dependably in an automated environment can be a challenge. Here’s a tip that can help. FTP was intended to work this way: a human types a command into a computer. The computer responds. The human types another command. The computer responds. Etc. Etc.

  …

  Read more

• Improving Upon WDSC’s Table View

  April 4, 2007 Jon Paris

  Although most WDSC users are familiar with the Table View, few take advantage of all its many features. For those of you unfamiliar with Table View, it is the closest thing in WDSC to the familiar PDM Work With lists. To display the equivalent of a Work With Members list, right click on the source file name to display the context menu and select Show in Table as shown below. The result is the display shown here: (Click here to see a larger image) Unlike the PDM list, options are selected from an item’s context menu. The primary

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: Graphically Moving i5/OS Objects with OpsNav

  April 4, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  One of the problems with i5 articles (including my own) is that the writers focus on accomplishing i5/OS tasks with 5250 green-screen commands. However, many newer administrators are more comfortable with graphical utilities, and learning command line techniques is not that desirable. To help those users, here is a primer on using IBM’s iSeries Navigator program to perform basic i5 file and library manipulation from a graphical interface. As you probably know, iSeries Navigator (OpsNav) is IBM’s graphical solution for managing i5, iSeries, and AS/400 machines. Packaged as part of its iSeries Access for Windows product, system operation tasks are

  …

  Read more

• CYBRA Finds the ‘Edge’ for Native i5/OS RFID Software

  April 3, 2007 Alex Woodie

  CYBRA last week unveiled EdgeMagic, a new edge server product designed to enable i5/OS shops to incorporate radio frequency identification (RFID) tracking technology into their own applications. Due out this summer with support for J.D. Edwards and VAI‘s S2K, EdgeMagic is expected to be the first and only native i5/OS RFID server product on the market. CYBRA has been in the RFID business for years, but until now, its offerings have been relegated to developing software that controls the printing, or “encoding,” of data onto RFID tags. That product, called MarkMagic, is based on the same technology that CYBRA

  …

  Read more

• Lakeview Adds More Autonomics to MIMIX

  April 3, 2007 Alex Woodie

  In a perfect world, high availability would be completely automated, and System i servers would fail over to backup machines without any input from operators. Obviously, we don’t live in a perfect world, and failovers are often fraught with uncertainty. Just the same, while fully automated failovers are still largely a pipe dream, there is the potential for autonomic technologies to take some of the fear out of hitting the “go” button during failovers, which is the tact that Lakeview Technology is taking with the just-released MIMIX version 5. Make no mistake: Lakeview could enable i5/OS customers to implement automated

  …

  Read more

• Thoughts on the Coexistence of Full Test Automation and Manual Testing

  April 3, 2007 Colin Armitage

  Automated software testing solutions have been around for more than 20 years but successful implementations are few and far between. Most organizations continue to execute the majority of their testing manually. Industry analysts peg market proliferation at just five percent, with 30 percent being the most extreme estimate. One reason for this damning failure is that users were promised that test automation could address 100 percent of their quality assurance requirements, but bitter experience has shown that total success was far more elusive. For these reasons, it can be said that anyone who tells you that software testing can be

  …

  Read more

• Help/Systems Boosts Graphics with Robot/NETWORK V10

  April 3, 2007 Alex Woodie

  While it’s nice to have utilities to help you manage a stand-alone System i server, systems management tools really start paying dividends when there’s more than one server to manage. That is where Robot/NETWORK from Help/Systems comes into play. With the latest version of Robot/NETWORK, the company has developed a new graphical user interface (GUI) to make it even easier to track the goings-on of multiple System i servers. Robot/NETWORK is used to connect multiple System i servers or logical partitions (LPARs) into a single chain, with a single “master” machine and a string of underling “nodes.” When a given

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles