Security breaches: Are you prepared?

Everywhere you look you see stories in the news about security breaches — stolen computers, lost data, bank account information that becomes public knowledge, what’s next? It really makes me wonder if we’re doing enough to secure our data. I recently came across a good article “Finding Needles of Data in an Unstructured Haystack” if security breaches are keeping you up at night, you might want to check it out. It’s a good read.

SOA insights from CIOs and CTOs

Is SOA on the top of your priority list?  You may have heard that “Almost everything you once knew about business computing has changed with SOA.” According to insights from CIOs and CTOs collected by the Object Management Group’s (OMG) SOA Consortium.  

System i printing: Configuring an ASCII printer

If you have a XXXX ASCII printer on your network and you’re wondering how to make this printer available to your iSeries users, check out this new tip by System i printing expert Chip Milosch. Chip does a great job of walking you through the process.

IBM and 3Com expand VoIP on System i

IBM and 3Com really want you to start up a VoIP system, or as they call it, IP telephony, on the System i.

The two announced the initial partnership to get VoIP on System i last October. Now the System i Network is reporting that they’re trying to pack more into the IP telephony package. I’m curious as to whether any of you out there have considered this or even taken the plunge and implemented it. Do you think VoIP on System i is a good thing, and are you thinking about doing it?

Lakeview updates MIMIX

Lakeview Technology this week announced the general availability of MIMIX version 5, the latest offering of its high-availability software for the System i.

It includes:

• IntelliStart for deployment of new applications.
• AutoGuard to help protect high-availability configurations for auditing.
• Dynamic Apply for remote journaling.
• CDP for data recovery; and
• Switch Assistant for planned or unplanned switchovers.

Centerfield seeks to help DB2 run smoother on the iSeries

Centerfield Technology, based in Rochester, Minn., released AutoDBA this week, which is designed to make DB2 on i5/OS run better by boosting SQL performance.

With more and more iSeries shops having to manage SQL because of their J.D. Edwards, SAP, or other applications, having it run as well as possible can be a challenge.

AutoDBA will be available this summer.

Monitoring for *Escape messages in AJS (Advanced Job Scheduler)

A lot of System Administrators utilize BRMS and IBM’s Advanced Job Scheduler to backup thier systems.  

In the past, one of the major drawbacks to the AJS was the fact that you couldn’t directly monitor for *Escape messages within the AJS command definitions. You had to create a CLP shell in order to do this.

Well… I don’t know when this changed, but I was looking through the AJS documentation the other day and stumbled across this:

Monitor for messages with Advanced Job Scheduler

Add message identifiers to any command within the command list of a job to monitor messages.

Each command in the command list of a job can have message identifiers that will be used for monitoring. When the job runs and an error message is issued that matches one of the messages entered for the selected command, the job logs the error but continues processing with the next command in the list.

If zeros are specified in either two or all four of the rightmost positions, such as ppmm00, a generic message identifier is specified. For example, if CPF0000 is specified, all the CPF messages are monitored.

To add message identifiers to a command, follow these steps:

1. Open Work Management from your iSeries™ Navigator window.
2. Right-click Advanced Job Scheduler.
3. Click Scheduled Jobs to list jobs.
4. Right-click the scheduled job and click Properties.
5. Select the command from the list and click Properties.
6. Click Messages.
7. Enter the message identifiers to monitor and click Add.

This feature is not available via the Green Screen interface to AJS. That is why I didn’t run into this a long time ago! One more reason to start using the iSeries navigator GUI interface!

Check it out…

 Kenneth

Hello…

Hello …

My name is Kenneth Graap and I will be sharing my thoughts on System i Backup/Recovery, Security and general System Administration.

This is my first attempt at “blogging”… It should be interesting!

Kenneth

First autonomic DB2 optimization tool for IBM System i

Centerfield Technology, Inc. announced the development of the first autonomic tool designed to optimize DB2 for i5/OS. AutoDBA, the name of the new component, provides expert DB2 advice and options to automatically implement that advice. The first release will focus on fully optimizing database indices (DDS logical files and SQL indices); with the objective of making SQL and RPG programs that process large amounts of data much more efficient. 

IBM to meet upset WDSc Shops half-way on features?

I just came across this article by Timothy Prickett Morgan. It looks like IBM is going to try to appease WDSc shops — although IBM won’t say just how it is going to accomplish that. Any ideas? Or is this just another way to keep the feathers from flying?