For years, many people, including me, have harangued you to “get rid of PUBLIC” authority. Despite all of the pleading, however, there remains a large number of customers that still have PUBLIC authority set to *USE or higher. I suspect at least part of the reason is because many of us are afraid to monkey with PUBLIC authority for fear of breaking something major. This fear is understandable. Many administrators are responsible for applications that were written before they joined the workforce.

A fairly trivial technique that I call “alternative PUBLIC authority” takes the fear–and the risk–out of changing PUBLIC

I am a blessed man. Among the niceties of life that I enjoy are hot and cold running water, central heat and air conditioning, abundant food, and the CL command prompter. Many people are not so fortunate.

The CL command prompter provides a functional way to pass properly formatted data to a program so the program can do what it was made to do. Developers who work on other systems can only dream of such a facility.

To prompt a command from a CL command line is simple: type the command name and press F4. I doubt this is news

One of my Power i Capacity BackUp (CBU) systems hit the wall last week. All of a sudden, none of our administrators could start a PC5250 green-screen session on the CBU. Each time they clicked on a PC5250 session icon, the user received an obscure CWBLM0020 error and they couldn’t get to the system. Here’s what happened and how it can affect any shop with an i/OS CBU system.

The Symptoms

When one of our administrators went to start a PC5250 session on our CBU, the session refused to start and she received the following error.

CWBLM0020 - Failure--Licensing Failure