• Disk Drive Shortage Coming Due To Thailand Flooding?

  October 31, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM i shops might be wishing soon that Big Blue was making its own disk drives in the Rochester, Minnesota, factory like it used to two decades ago soon. The flooding in Thailand, which is causing much tragedy and strife at the moment, is having a secondary effect of limiting supplies of disk drives. The monsoons in Thailand have been particularly brutal this year, and dozens of companies that make components for disk drives, as well as the disk drives themselves, relocated to Thailand many years ago to take advantage of inexpensive labor. Seagate Technology and Hitachi are presumably the

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• Best i Blog Bets: A Top 10 List

  October 31, 2011 Alex Woodie

  You’re a smart and well-read member of the IBM i community. Your Web browser’s homepage is naturally set to www.itjungle.com so you’ll be sure to get the latest IBM i news, product reviews, and tech tips. But you understand that the Web is World-Wide, and there are lots of other good sources of IBM i insight and opinion beyond our humble website. So bust out the bookmarks–here are the top 10 blogs for the IBM i community. 1. You and i ibmsystemsmag.blogs.com/you_and_i/ IBM i chief architect Steve Will shares his inside view of the platform’s development at the IBM lab

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• European Slowdown Puts The Profit Squeeze On Avnet

  October 31, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The uncertainty in the European economies and the after effects of some acquisitions in the region pushed down profits for master IT distributor Avnet in the first quarter of its fiscal 2012, which ended in September. That’s the bad news, which is not bad relative to the political and economic uncertainty we’re all facing. The good news is that the IT side of Avnet still showed very impressive year-on-year growth in a quarter that is not generally the strongest one for the company. In the quarter ended October 1, Avnet posted sales of $6.43 billion, up 3.9 percent from the

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• IBM To Unchain RPG Open Access?

  October 31, 2011 Dan Burger

  It’s unconfirmed, but I have to give IBM credit for correcting its course and making the best use of RPG Open Access anyway. Last week, the company let a few people know (the press was not included) that it was no longer going to charge for Rational Open Access: RPG Edition. It’s expected this will significantly boost the visibility and use of this product and the products of third-party vendors that have incorporated ROA. It’s a smart move. Just last week in The Four Hundred, I wrote an article that noted how the ISVs using ROA had sequentially contracted

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• Palmisano Hands The IBM Reins To Rometty

  October 31, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The drama is over, and Ginni Rometty, who has spent the past three decades at IBM, is going to be the next president and chief executive officer at the company. Rometty, who is 54, beat out her colleagues Mike Daniels, who is 56 and who runs Global Services, and Steve Mills, who is 60 and who runs Systems and Software Group, for the job. Sam Palmisano, who has held the president position since 2000, the CEO job since 2002, and the chairman job since 2003, will remain chairman of the board at the request of Rometty and the board.

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• Bang For The Buck on Power7 Gen 2 Servers

  October 31, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When the second generation Power7 servers were launched back on October 12, IBM said that it wanted to bring faster peripherals and doubled-up main memory to the Gen 2 machines, but it also wanted to keep the prices for the machines on the entry Power 710, 720, 730, and 740 machines the same as it was for the Gen 1 machines in terms of processor cards, processor core activations, and software. The new Power 770 and Power 780 Gen 2 machines also were supposed to be in the same pricing brackets. As readers of The Four Hundred know, I like

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• Limiting How Much Memory a Storage Pool Can Allocate

  October 26, 2011 Hey, Joe

  I want to run the i OS Performance Adjuster to automatically allocate system memory to my subsystems. But when I turn it on, most of the memory goes to the *INTERACT storage pool used by the QINTER subsystem. I want to take care of interactive users, but I also want some memory left over for other subsystems. How do I limit *INTERACT from using too much memory? –Jens This sometimes happens with using the i operating system automatic performance adjustment feature. By default in the i 6.1 operating system, the Performance Adjustment (QPFRADJ) system value is set to “2”. This

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• VALUES: A Truly Useless DDS Keyword

  October 26, 2011 Hey, Ted

  We had a recent crisis in our shop. When we dug to the root of the problem, we found that one of our files had an invalid value in one of the fields. I don’t understand why this was the case, because the programmer who wrote the DDS used the VALUES keyword on the field in question. Does the VALUES keyword not prevent invalid data from entering the database? –Paul No, Paul. One would think it does, but use of the VALUES keyword only applies to the workstation controller. That is, only the green-screen interface is restricted by the VALUES

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• 10 Facts You Should Know about Special Values

  October 26, 2011 Ted Holt

  Imagine not being allowed to code *FIRST in the MBR parameter of the Override with Database File (OVRDBF) command. Horrible thought, isn’t it? Special values make commands more sensible and easy to use. Here are 10 facts every IBM i developer should know in order to effectively use special values in his own commands. 1. Special values are character strings that are incompatible with validity checking rules. In this example, BATCH requires a three-digit number, and *ALL does not fit that description. PARM KWD(BATCH) + TYPE(*DEC) LEN(3 0) + DFT(*ALL) + REL(*GT 0) + SPCVAL((*ALL -1)) + PROMPT('Batch number')</all> 2.

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• On ‘GTFM’ and a Place for Experts

  October 25, 2011 Richard Shearwood

  IT Jungle‘s executive managing editor Dan Burger last week wrote: “But if all the manuals are Web-based, what will I do with all that space on my book shelves?” More importantly, what will you do when you are trying to work out why your Internet is down? Or, as often happens to me, working on a server in a DC screened for mobile signals and with no Internet access at the machine? Even more importantly: have you USED the IBM support portal? Unusable results and a clunky interface mean that even IBMers use Google to find stuff. It has

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