FHG Archives - Page 26 of 144

Admin Alert: A Primer For Setting Up PC5250 SSL Connectivity, Part 1

October 9, 2013 Joe Hertvik

To better secure your IBM i Access for Windows connections (Access for Windows), you may be required to encrypt your PC5250 Telnet sessions using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. If you need SSL encryption for your PC5250 setups, here’s a primer for setting up your IBM i and PC clients to communicate via SSL certificates.

The Overview

Setting up Telnet SSL connectivity between your PCs and your IBM i partition requires you to perform the following configuration steps in your IBM i Digital Certificate Manager (DCM), your network, and on your PCs running IBM i Access for Windows.

On your

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Create A Generic Auditing Trigger With SQL

September 25, 2013 Hey, Mike

Note: The document accompanying this article is available for download here.

I am writing a trigger receiver program using RPG with embedded SQL that will go through the before and after record images and create an audit record in an audit file for each field that was changed on an update operation.

I am developing a “shell” trigger program that I’d like to be able to modify slightly, and use the shell as a basis to write these audit records for each file with a trigger on it.

Instead of writing multiple (IF this field changed THEN DO…) for

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CPYFRMIMPF And Fixed Data

September 25, 2013 Ted Holt

It seems that every time I see Copy from Import File (CPYFRMIMPF) mentioned in a Web forum, the question concerns CSV files. CPYFRMIMPF also handles files of fixed-length fields. Such files have certain advantages over CSV files, and there’s more to using them than the IBM documentation tells you.

Don’t get me wrong. CSV files are great. I use them often. But consider that fixed-length data has its advantages. Two that come to mind are:

Fixed-length character fields may contain any character without the nuisance of special treatment. In CSV files, character fields require special handling of the characters used

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Cleaning Up Excessive Job Logs On Your IBM i System

September 25, 2013 Hey, Joe

Thanks for the article on managing IBM i spooled files. We often find it useful to examine user job logs to see exactly where a problem is. But lately, we’ve been getting too many spooled files in QEZJOBLOG. We’re getting 17,000 QZSHSH and QP0ZSPWP job logs each day from website jobs. Any ideas on how to make these useless job logs go away?

–Dale

Preventing A Job Log From Being Generated

My first thought is to see where these jobs are coming from. If you can find the CL program, job scheduler, or submit jobs statement that launches these

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Retrieve The Call Stack In DB2 For i

September 11, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

Note: The document accompanying this article is available for download here.

Troubleshooting problems is often a costly component of application maintenance. Consider the case when the user reports an application crash. Exactly what program crashed? Was it the UI logic or business logic embedded in a service program? If it was a service program, what procedure was running? What was the chain of events that led to the problem? Knowing what the call stack looks like can help answer many of these questions, thereby reducing costly investigation time. Since writing “persistent stored modules” (a.k.a., SQL routines) is increasingly popular

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Thinking In Pointers

September 11, 2013 Ted Holt

Suppose you were to ask me how large an alphanumeric variable should be, and I replied that I didn’t know, nor did I care. Wouldn’t that sound odd? Those of us who have been programming in business languages such as RPG, COBOL, and CL since the French and Indian War always think it’s important to know the size of a variable, otherwise we won’t be able to define it properly in a program. But when you work with pointers, a variable’s defined size doesn’t necessarily matter. Let me show you what I’m talking about.

Consider a command:

CMD        PROMPT('Do something')

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Admin Alert: Six Tips For Managing IBM i Spooled File Storage

September 11, 2013 Joe Hertvik

While recently reviewing system storage on an IBM i partition, we were shocked to discover that spooled files (SPLFs, pronounced spliffs) took up over 10 percent of our usable system storage. Based on that experience and what my shop learned cleaning it up, here are six techniques for keeping your spooled file storage under control.

The Big Six For Spooled File Storage Management

Don’t have FNDBIGSPLF? Get FNDBIGSPLF!!!
Check your IBM i cleanup parameters (GO CLEANUP) to delete old job logs and system generated output
Check for automatically scheduled jobs that are generating unnecessary spooled files
The 2.5 million-page

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Override Default Data Types In The SQL Descriptor

August 21, 2013 Hey, Mike

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

I’d like to use SQL Descriptors in an embedded SQL program to read column data into host variables. However, if my host variable type doesn’t match exactly the parameter or column data type then I receive an SQL0076 error: “DATA or INDICATOR item not correct.” How can I, for example, receive the data from a CHAR(10) column from the SQL descriptor into an RPG varying-length character 20 variable, without using an explicit CAST in the SQL statement?

–J.B.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you’re unfamiliar with SQL descriptors, please see

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Join The Queue With Open Access

August 21, 2013 Jon Paris

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

It has been a while since my last tip on RPG Open Access and now that everyone running IBM i V6 or 7 has access to it for no additional cost, I thought it was time to revisit the subject.

OA handlers operate in one of two modes: buffer and names/values. The buffer option performs better, but requires the handler to know the layout of the data in the buffer in advance. Names/values (NV) handlers, such as the one I introduced in the previous article, do not

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Which Job Is Filling Up My System Storage?

August 21, 2013 Hey, Joe

Every so often, our system storage breaches its threshold level, and we have to find the job that is filling up storage before it crashes our system. This is usually a race against time. Do you have any tips on how to quickly find runaway jobs that are gobbling up storage?

–Mike

I feel your pain on this one. Hitting the threshold can be a recurring event in some shops, and it’s always better to find out sooner when this problem occurs rather than later.

Here’s how I handle this issue.

Set Your ASP Threshold At A Reasonable Level

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