IBM Systems Magazine Blogs

This is the fourth post in this series where I have been writing about the drive for new technology. Is need driving innovation or is innovation driving demand? In other words, what came first: the chicken or the egg? In this post, I explore an area of innovation focused on APIs.

Michael A.M. Felt discusses OpenSSH. 

Especially in the open source world, people talk about shells a lot. Instructions to “run this command in a shell” are standard fare. But, what is a shell? Simply put, a shell is a command processor. It is a program that takes input from the user and runs the appropriate commands. Conceptually, it is much like the CL entry screen you’ve used in 5250. Rather than running CL commands from the QSYS.LIB filesystem, it runs executable binaries from a hierarchical file system (stream files from the QOpenSys or root filesystems on IBM i). This includes things like open source language runtimes, common shell commands (ls, cd, pwd, cp), or any PASE executable (most open source). The best way to access a shell on IBM i is from an SSH client.

Dump a Communications Trace was a blog I wrote back in 2009. That article reviewed the support for dumping the trace data in “packet capture” (PCAP) format and hinted that the DMPCMNTRC command would likely be updated to support this feature (without the need for a data area).

Jon Paris and Susan Gantner offer their take on a few of the most recent news items around the IBM i world that you may have missed. 

In my previous two blogs, I’ve talked about reasons your executives might have to do a review of your platforms—things which indicate that the time is right to get prepared to promote the value of IBM i to your business leaders. To do that promotion, you need information. Today I’m going to address one of those reasons: staffing.

Long-time readers of this blog know I've often discussed the mainframe skills shortage and cited various initiatives that aim to attract the next generation of talent. I came across new organization while attending last month's SHARE conference: LEAD-IT (Leadership, Empowerment, Apprenticeship and Diversity in Information Technology).

Have you heard about the new Cloud Management Console (CMC)? It provides a new way of managing our environments from a single pane of glass. The data from your HMC flows to a central location, and you manage it there. If you have multiple HMCs in a large environment, that's a great convenience.