I just returned from the Opening Session of this years Common Conference here in Anaheim.

I was surprised to here about the new Common Skills Portal: http://www.common.org/skills/ Something I’m certainly going to spend a little time looking at!

Some time was spent honoring Common’s best speakers, followed by a presentation of iSociety: http://isociety.common.org/

Mark Shearer took the stage along with Dr. Frank.

Dr. Frank had just come from 1998 and was quite surprised to here how his beloved AS400 had turned out. It was a lot of fun to watch. Even though I think Dr. Frank should keep his day job and leave acting to the pros (Ha! Just kidding… )

Mark continued on with his presentation and spent some time talking about Blade Center integration, IP Telephony, Capacity Backup systems, PHP and MySql…

Next we got to here more about the recently announced System i Express systems - http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp5052.html

As at every Common Conference we heard that IBM was going to improve the marking of the System i .. Nothing new here <smile>

Mark also talked about how IBM was working to help improve the System i Skills shortage. Something we all should be concerned about. To learn more about this initiative take a look here:

http://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/university/scholars/products/iseries/index.html

 We got to see another skit making fun of Intel Servers… This is always good for a laugh and then the session closed with a few minutes of Q&A …

All in all I enjoyed attending … and I wish all of you could have been here too…

Kenneth

I’ve always been unhappy with how the default owner of an object in the IFS is determined.

When a new object is created the ownership is, by default,  the creating user’s profile name.

When objects are shared amoung a group of profiles (Group Profile Membership), this can lead to problems, especially if someone in the group has to delete an object created by another group member.

I have learned that if a directory object has the S_ISGID permission bit set ON, then whenever a new object is created in that directory the owner of the object will be the same as the directory’s PRIMARY GROUP OWNER.

The S_ISGID permission bit can be set on a couple of different ways.

You can use the CHGATR command… For example:

 CHGATR OBJ('/PRDCIS/INBOUND') ATR(*SETGID) VALUE(*YES)

or, via the Properties/Security tab within iSeries Navigator:

Kenneth

Have you ever wondered what all the server jobs running on your server do?

IBM has put together a great reference page describing them…

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/iseries/v5r2/ic2924/info/rzaks/rzaksserverjobcheattable.xml

Take a look…

Kenneth 

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 …

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