• As I See It: One Cabbage Leaf

  October 24, 2011 Victor Rozek

  Nations are typically organized around a set of founding principles and enduring personality traits. France initially coalesced around the rallying cry of the revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and later embraced overpriced food and rude service. America united in its support of individual rights and unlimited use of fossil fuels. And Canada stood unabashedly for real maple syrup and hockey. But whether it’s settling a frontier, relieving a monarch of his head, or deposing whatever crony the CIA chooses for you, once governments achieve their basic mandates, the wise ones seek new ways to improve the lives of their citizens. By

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• IBM Bolsters PowerHA with New Replication Options, GUI

  October 24, 2011 Alex Woodie

  One of the October 12 IBM announcements that we didn’t cover in last week’s The Four Hundred was new PRPQ features added to the PowerHA SystemMirror for i offering, which is IBM’s hardware-based disk clustering solution. IBM announced that PowerHA customers can now replicate data across additional external storage systems, including the Storwize V7000 midrange array and the SAN Volume Controller (SVC) appliance. PowerHA also got a new GUI and new command-line functionality. PowerHA SystemMirror for i, in case you forgot, was officially unveiled as part of the IBM i 7.1 launch in April 2008, and is the follow-on product

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• Power Systems Carries That Weight In IBM’s Third Quarter

  October 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite the impending launch of new Power7-based machines that came out on October 12, the Power Systems business on which IBM i customers depend nonetheless booked another great 13 weeks in the third quarter of 2011. Even though IBM was short $103 million compared to what Wall Street expected it to do in terms of aggregate sales, profits were right on target and Big Blue was confident enough in the fourth quarter to raise its earnings guidance for the third time this year. In the quarter, IBM’s sales rose by 7.8 percent, to $24.2 billion, with net income under a

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• IBM Gooses Power Systems Storage and Networking

  October 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we discussed in last week’s issue, on October 12 IBM rolled out some new entry and enterprise Power7-based systems with double the maximum memory capacity and with support for PCI-Express 2.0 peripheral cards, doubling up the bandwidth per slow. But there were a bunch of other enhancements to storage and networking adapters, too, and these are useful for all Power Systems shops on reasonably recent machinery. The new SAS disk and flash drive controllers are the most interesting new devices that IBM put out in the October announcements. With solid state drives now coming into vogue to boost

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• Admin Alert: Adding Redundancy to Power i SMS Monitoring

  October 19, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  In an earlier column, I discussed how to use email addressing to send text message alerts to Power i administrators when a problem occurs. This week, I’ll discuss how to enhance that solution by providing redundancy for i OS text messaging, so that urgent messages can always be delivered regardless of whether or not your email system is running. The Coverage Plan, Phase I In my previous article, I outlined a monitoring plan for using cell phones, email, and text messages to alert administrators when critical iSeries, System i, and Power i events occur. This plan consisted of

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• Dealing with Faulty Logic

  October 19, 2011 Ted Holt

  Supposedly computer programming is a logical science. One would think, then, that computer programmers would be logical thinkers. It is not so. Let me provide a few examples of illogical thinking taken from real production programs. Then I will show a simple, low-tech way to deal with logical expressions so that they don’t end up illogical. Let’s start with this example taken from fixed-format RPG specs. I suggest you find the bad logic yourself before reading my comments. TYPE IFNE 'A' TYPE IFEQ 'S' XCODE CABNE 'S' CONTIN ENDIF TYPE IFEQ *BLANK XCODE CABEQ 'S' CONTIN ENDIF ENDIF This code

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• Return a User Profile Listing to a .NET Client

  October 19, 2011 Hey, Mike

  I am a VB.NET programmer and am looking to retrieve a list of all users and their expiration dates on our AS/400 system. I stumbled across the cwbx library and have been able to connect to our system, but not much else from there. Can you suggest how this info can be retrieved from VB.NET? Thanks. –Elliot Hi, Elliot: The easiest way to retrieve this user info is to use the i/OS Display User Profile (DSPUSRPRF) command and dump the results to a table (also known as an outfile): DSPUSRPRF USRPRF(*ALL) OUTPUT(*OUTFILE) OUTFILE(QTEMP/LSTUSRPRFP) The above command (assuming you have the

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• RTFM Being Replaced by GTFM

  October 18, 2011 Dan Burger

  “Read the freaking manual” (RTFM) is a common response (usually agitated response) to questions that invariably come up in IT settings. Sometimes it’s conversational, but it more frequently occurs in email or instant messaging or a posting on a forum. But in a conversation I had last week with Bill Hammond, product marketing manager at Vision Solutions, he asked me to imagine a world where sagging shelves overloaded with manuals the size of Tokyo phone books no longer existed. What? No product manuals? You’ve got to be kidding. How will anything get fixed? It’s all about changing the user

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• Computer Guidance Updates Construction Management System

  October 18, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Computer Guidance Corp. (CGC) recently launched version 4 of its Construction Management System, eCMS. Major new features in eCMS 4.0 include a new GUI, an updated business intelligence module, and an updated content management system. CGC’s flagship application provides mid- to large-size contractors and other companies in the construction industry with an integrated platform for a range of activities, including financial accounting, project management, bidding, and human resources. The software, which runs exclusively on the IBM i platform, is available as an IBM i Solution Edition and as a hosted application. CGC says eCMS 4.0 contains hundreds of new features.

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• Fiserv Touts Magic Gartner Study, Partners with Kronos

  October 18, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Gartner has placed Fiserv‘s IBM i-based Signature banking system in the leaders quadrant of its “Magic Quadrant for International Retail Core Banking” report for 2011. Also, Fiserv announced it has partnered with workforce management software provider Kronos to help Signature customers maximize their labor efficiencies. Gartner’s Magic Quadrants, if you’ve never seen one, rank IT solutions on two axes, including the “completeness of vision” and the “ability to execute.” Those that score well in both categories are placed in the vaunted upper left quadrant of the magical box. Nine other vendors had solutions in the winners quadrant, Fiserv says.

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