Month: June 2022

I’ve had the chance to get out and meet with people from the IBM i community lately at COMMON and the NHMUG meeting. After two long years of isolation, it was great to be out again and talk with people. Everyone was excited to get together, but there was another topic on everyone’s mind; how do we fix the great IBM i resource shortage and find more people to support IBM i?

It’s an interesting problem when you think about it. IBM i is the backbone of many industries, from financials and trucking to manufacturing and everything in between. IBM i runs the world, literally. Yet, for a platform so critical to industry and its success, there is very little education available for students to learn about this platform. There are a few opportunities for students to learn about IBM i, such as Gateway Technical College (They do a great job, and their students are successful in landing jobs in the IBM i world.), but they are few and far between.

Why is it that every student knows how to use a PC? But when they go to college, don’t learn about IBM i as an option? When I was attending classes, I could take AS/400 courses. Half of the class were adult learners who worked with the platform and wanted to learn more about it. I needed college credits at the time, and I had been an AS/400 administrator at my previous job and was working at a software company for AS/400 change management, so it seemed like a good idea.

I was a System Administrator for an AS/400 shop running JDE when I was twenty. I was tossed into the role when I was laid off from the same company as a Sales Administrator the week before. Two people in the IT department gave their notice on the same day. I received a call from my friend who was promoted to IT Manager, and she asked if I wanted to learn about the system.

That was it. I had an aptitude for computers my whole life. It started in the fifth grade when our Principal decided we all needed to learn about computers. He taught small groups of students at a time about the computer and how we could write Basic programs to make it do things. Before we could even touch the computer, he made us memorize …

The post How Do We Fix The Great IBM i Resource Shortage? first appeared on iTech Solutions Group.

The IBM i Access Client Solutions tool is the de facto standard for managing your IBM i systems. It allows you to start 5250 telnet sessions, 5250 console sessions, transfer files to and from the system, run SQL scripts, analyze SQL performance, create indexes, and much, much more. Most organizations have a significant number of users that are using this product or its predecessor – IBM i Access for Windows. Updates come to the product once or twice a year and performing those updates can be a bit cumbersome with a large number of users. Often times the updates just never get done.

There has been one large drawback when it comes to changing from Access for Windows to Client Solutions – it requires Java to be installed on each workstation. This then also requires the administrator to ensure Java is getting updated on all those workstations. In some cases, the only application requiring Java on these workstations is Client Solutions.

An option that’s been gaining traction recently is centrally deploying IBM i Access Client Solutions – putting it on a file share and placing a shortcut on each user’s desktop to execute it remotely. Using this option allows you to update the product once and all users then have the newest version the next time they launch the product. And it gets even better:  You can also include your Java JRE in this central location, and then you don’t have to have it installed on every end user’s workstation!

Follow these simple steps to put the JRE in the proper spot:

Download a Java JRE (such as IBM Semeru Java 11 OpenJ9 JRE)
https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes/downloads/
 Locate the folder with the Windows executable on the file server (C:UsersPublicIBMClientSolutionsStart_ProgramsWindows_x86-64)
 Unzip the folder into the Windows_x86-64 directory and rename it – adding jre on to the end of it. Client Solutions will find the Java JRE as long as the folder ends in jre.

Now with a simple shortcut to the executable on the file share, users can access both IBM i Access Client Solutions and the necessary Java file to run it. One last note – when you go to update Client Solutions in the future, make sure you make a copy of your AcsConfig.properties outside the install directory, update the product, and then overwrite the new AcsConfig.properties with the copied one. This will prevent you from losing changes you’ve made to …

The post Deploying Access Client Solutions Centrally with Java Included first appeared on iTech Solutions Group.

These days I spend a fair amount of my time working with IBM i clients of all sizes to enhance their backup strategy.  Or in some cases just crafting a solid backup strategy that they could actually recover from. Recoverability remains the most important driver for point in time backups. Unfortunately, due to a lack of knowledge, demands for uptime, outdated hardware, or just simply a lack of care for business resiliency, some organizations fall into a reality where they have little faith in their recoverability.

I cannot stress how important your backup strategy is and will be, as we operate in a world of ransomware and cyber-attacks.

We have noticed a major uptick in IBM i shops that have business operations taken down due to cyber-attacks. I am going to try not to get on my Security soap box here and stick with point in time backup strategy. So I will keep the security talk brief. One of the best things you can do to protect your organization from a security threat, is have a solid backup. Sure, there are many things we can do to position ourselves well for preventing an attack. Having a solid backup gives you the piece of mind, that you can get back up on your feet if you ever get knocked down.

Great news is we can greatly enhance the quality and drastically reduce the impact point in time backups have on the business and its users with IBM’s FlashSystem external storage portfolio. Many IBM i shops continue to shy away from external storage due to their perception of cost and the fear of additional complexity. While I can’t argue that external storage becomes another thing to manage when you are used to internal disk and IBM i just being a rockstar at managing it, I think you would be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t at least look at the value it can serve up to the business before dismissing it.

One of the biggest reasons IBM i shops shortchange their backups is due to demands for uptime.

Backing up to LTO tape or even a VTL requires downtime and for shops running 24×7 operations, this becomes a major problem.  With IBM FlashSystem external SAN storage and a tool called FlashCopy, which is built into the software stack called Spectrum Virtualize, you are able to get a full system save with …

The post Reimagining Your IBM i Backup Strategy With External Storage first appeared on iTech Solutions Group.

Below is a table of the major group PTFs for the last few releases. This is what we are installing for our customers on iTech Solutions Quarterly Maintenance program.

7.5
7.4
7.3
7.2
7.1
6.1
V5R4

Cumul Pack
22104
22125
22132
21084
17192
15063
12094

Tech. Refresh
–
6
12
9
11
–
–

Grp Hipers
5
82
160
215
283
210
204

DB Group
1
21
29
27
43
33
33

DB2 Mirror
1
19
–
–
–
–
–

Java Group
1
14
25
35
48
41
34

Print Group
–
–
–
3
13
31
49

Backup/Recov.
1
31
57
76
75
61
57

Blade/IXA/IXS
–
–
–
1
16
30
15

HTTP
2
20
39
51
53
46
36

TCP/IP
–
7
11
12
11
17
22

Security
2
33
73
106
110
60
 33

High Availability
–
9
17
20
18
 5

Hardware
–
2
18
35
44
 17

Open Source
–
–
6
6
6
–

The easiest way to check your levels is to issue the command WRKPTFGRP. They should all have a status of installed, and you should be up to the latest for all the above, based upon your release. Now there are more groups than the ones listed above, but these are the general ones that most people require. We can help you know which group PTFs you should be installing on your machine based upon your licensed programs. Here is a nice tidbit. The Cumulative PTF package number is broken down as YDDD, where Y is the year and DDD is the day it was released. Therefore, if we look at the cumulative package for 7.3, the ID is 21245. We can determine that it was created on the 245th day of 2021, which is September 2, 2021. Look at your machine and this will give you a quick indication of just how far out of date in PTFs you may be.

HMCs

Fixes are listed below in the order in which they should be installed for each software version. If you are upgrading to a new release, install the base version from recovery media or network image and then apply updates in the order listed. If you already have fixes applied and your current fix level is not in this list, just start with the next higher-numbered fix pack in the list. Be sure to read the release …

The post IBM i, FSP, and HMC release levels and PTFs (June 2022) first appeared on iTech Solutions Group.