• Raz-Lee Launches Web Interface for iSecurity Suite

  May 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Green screen interfaces were just fine in the old days of the AS/400. But today, many IBM i administrators would prefer a little more color with their screens. For IBM i shops that use software from Raz-Lee Security to police their system, they now have the option of using a Web-based graphical user interface (GUI) to interact with the company’s entire suite of tools.

  Raz-Lee has included GUIs in its offerings for many years. In the 2000s, it developed a Java-based interface for certain components of its iSecurity Suite. More recently, it developed an Eclipse-based product called the iSecurity GUI …

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• Welcome To The ‘Riehl’ World: Live, Hands-On IBM i Training

  May 18, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops don’t have a ton of options available when it comes to online IBM i education these days. If you’re in the market to improve your skills, one of the outfits that should be on your shortlist is The 400 School, which is one of the few places left that offers hands-on IBM i education, according to the company’s founder and president, Dan Riehl.

  Riehl has had the kind of IBM midrange career that younger folks arriving on the platform today can only dream of. He has founded companies, written books, worked as a security consultant and …

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• Where Is IBM i?

  May 13, 2020 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve worked with the IBM i platform for any length of time, you realize that it can be hard to find. That’s true in the field, where companies sometimes aren’t even aware their applications are running on an IBM i system. But it’s also true when it comes to IBM’s own website, where you’d think i might be easier to find.

  Finding the IBM i homepage by navigating IBM’s website (www.ibm.com) is a bit like searching for the bathroom in the mall by walking the entire length of every floor. You know it has to be there. …

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• Having Second Thoughts About New Power Systems Iron?

  May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when midrange computers cost somewhat more than they do today (without adjusting for inflation, mind you) and the amount of processing, memory, storage, and networking capacity of the boxes was absolutely miniscule compared to what we can buy today (but sufficient to the task), customers looking to add more AS/400 or iSeries capacity to their datacenter didn’t have to shop around a current N generation or N-1 generation machine, but they could also look into the secondhand market for used N-1, N-2, and even N-3 generation machines and try to buy capacity on the …

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• The X Factor: Home Base

  April 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you might imagine, New York City is on my mind a lot these days. And I have some advice for you as you are transitioning to tighter quarters and working from home – something I have been doing for 25 years now.

  Way back in the dawn of time, back in the wake of the launch of the AS/400 when I graduated from college and moved to New York City because it was the biggest, scariest thing that I could do, my brain sort of melted from the enormity of it all. At that time, a recession was underway …

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• imPower Technologies Embraces Switch to Online Learning

  April 8, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Traditional schools around the world are in turmoil as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown and the sudden switch to online learning. For Jim Buck and his new IBM i training venture, imPower Technologies, the sudden popularity of virtual education validates the work he and his colleagues have done to build an Internet-based IBM i education operation.

  “We’ve been preparing for this unknowingly for years now,” imPower Technologies Chief Operating Officer Michelle Lyons says. “Had we known, we couldn’t have prepared better.”

  Buck and Lyons started building imPower Technologies nearly three years ago to provide an online vehicle to deliver …

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• Guru: SQL Checks For Control Breaks

  April 6, 2020 Ted Holt

  A control break occurs when the combined value of one or more fields changes from one row (record) to the next when reading a data set sequentially. I used to write RPG programs with control breaks often. Now that reports are less common, I write them less often, but that’s not to say I never write a program with control breaks.

  When I first learned to handle control breaks in RPG, I used the L1 through L9 level indicators. These worked wonderfully and fed my family for several years. When I moved from the System/36 world to the S/38 (and …

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• The Midrange Gets Pinched A Little More

  March 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The X86 server market turned in its best quarter ever in the final three months of 2019, will more machinery going out the door and more money coming in than has ever happened in the history of the systems market. Even if you adjusted sales in past quarters for inflation, it is still true. It was kind of crazy, even with some soft sales among OEM suppliers, the combination of ODM sales to hyperscalers and cloud builders. X86 server shipments rose by 12.9 percent to 3.35 million machines and revenues rose by 6.3 percent to $22.44 billion, according to the …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Giving IBM i Developers A Helping Hand

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The good thing about the Moore’s Law improvements in compute, storage, and networking capacity is that the cost of a complete IT system more accurately reflects where the real value of that system was always really derived.

  In decades gone by, the AS/400 hardware cost represented somewhere on the order of 85 percent of the cost of a server and its storage and the OS/400 systems software accounted for the remaining 15 percent or so. Over time, the hardware costs have dropped to about a third of the overall system cost as systems have also gotten incredibly more powerful. But …

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• Big Blue Cuts Deals On Entry Power Systems Iron

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With no new Power processors on the immediate horizon, except a kicker Power9’ that is aimed at supercomputer systems providing a testbed for future high bandwidth main memory technology that will debut with the Power10 chips in 2021, IBM has to do something to try to move some iron. Price cuts are always a good incentive.

  And so, we see in announcement letter ZAEP0091B, which was quietly updated on March 5, when it came to our attention, after being announced on January 24, when we did not see in the IBM online announcement feed (because it wasn’t there, not …

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