Resources

Article

High Availability Fail Tales (and How to Avoid Them)

Chasing a high availability state is a common goal for IBM i administrators and one that can be thwarted by a single issue left unattended. By sharing some of the most frequent tales of what went wrong from real-world environments, you’ll be able to avoid these same scenarios.
Article

Monitoring the Demands of Fast Disk

The IT industry is decisively moving away from traditional hard disk drives (“platters”) in favor of Flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs). It’s a welcome change; it makes much more sense to circulate only electrons instead of disks of metal with electrons on them.
Article

A Modern Approach to Performance Management

Using modern performance monitoring tools, you can build a successful strategy for performance management and quickly add value in your organization.
Article

Small but MIGHTY: Controlling the *CLS Object Type

While the instinct for administrators and IT managers is to always hunt down a culprit – a rogue job, an inactive journal receiver, or something else – sometimes the very building blocks of a common process, or rather the specifics that define processes, can be where the trouble at hand resides.
Article

Improve Event Auditing Using the System Audit Journal

With any security implementation, established rules become less effective as time passes. Because your security requirements and your systems aren’t static, you must continually audit and adapt your security plan to stay current. Be aware that your system is constantly changing.
Article

High Availability and Your Enterprise Job Streams

The concept of high availability has been on the minds of IT decision makers in the last several years. As the recent IBM Top Concerns survey revealed, comprehensive high availability is the second highest concern among IBM i users, with only keeping current skill sets coming ahead.
Article

Where to Start with IBM i Operations

Have you recently adopted an IBM server running IBM i and don’t know where to begin with system operations? You are not alone.
Article

Get a Handle on Your Job Stream with Forecasting

A Robot Schedule forecast shows you the run activity scheduled for all Robot Schedule jobs over a time period that you specify. Robot Schedule uses the job schedule, job completion history, and any information you add for user jobs, remote prerequisites, and members of remote groups to make its forecast.
Article

On the Trail of IBM i Audit Data

Believe it or not, auditors are your friends, but audit reporting might be your worst enemy. Gathering all that data can take ages, unless you’ve already keeping automated audit trails across your operations.
Article

Robot and FlashCopy

Last month, Chuck Stupca (retired IBMer) and Chuck Losinski (Fortra) presented a webinar discussing FlashCopy for IBM i. Based on the attendance, it looks like this is a very important topic for many of you so I wanted to explain how FlashCopy ties to Robot products.
Article

Dealing with Temporary Files in WebDocs iSeries

WebDocs iSeries uses the IFS directory /RJSTEMP and the library RJSTEMP to store information and files temporarily. In general, it will attempt to clean up after itself, but there are situations which arise that do not perform clean up operations. As a result, files will gradually accumulate, taking up disk that could otherwise be used for other processes. The RJSTEMP library The RJSTEMP isn’t...
Article

Advanced Troubleshooting in WebDocs iSeries

As a WebDocs iSeries administrator, if something goes wrong your users will look to you to find, and fix, the matter. Simply knowing where to look when an initial error message is unclear can resolve a huge percentage of difficulties.
Article

Robot Best Practices

Wondering about best practices for automating your IBM i processes with Robot systems management solutions? Take a look at this list and get off to a good start.