Hertvik Business Services – Joe's Blog

IT Jungle published my latest tip on how to create new job queues for work management in a batch subsystem.

Check it out now by clicking here.

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Follow Joe Hertvik on Twitter @JoeHertvik. You can also add Joe to your professional network on LinkedIn by clicking here.

Here’s a common fix for when you can’t perform a Windows FTP transfer with your IBM i partition.

It’s common for a Windows-to-IBM i FTP transfer to get blocked, when the Windows desktop firewall blocks port 20 traffic to the Windows desktop (port 20 is used in the FTP data transfer).

You may even see your FTP session connect to your IBM i partition but fail when it tries to transfer data. Sometimes the desktop will display an FTP 425 error–Unable to open data connection. This recently happened to a client of mine who was having trouble performing an FTP upload from a FedEx server on their warehouse floor.

The best way to take care of this is to turn off the Windows firewall on the blocked machine. That should allow you to complete the transfer.

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For a project I’m working on, we’re trying to determine how much network traffic travels to a particular IBM i partition and what IP addresses the traffic is coming from. The purpose is to model the traffic before we move the partition to another network, so we have a big enough telecom pipe to accommodate incoming data.

We put a Cisco layer three switch between the network and my IBM i partition so we could capture the traffic. But our network manager also wanted to know whether we could natively analyze network data on our IBM i by using an sFlow server. Sponsored by the sFlow.org consortium, sFlow samples and monitors data running through networked, wireless, and host devices. An sFlow server is handy for analyzing network traffic, as I wanted to do here. Continue reading →

IT Jungle just posted my latest tip on preparing to switch production processing to your IBM i CBU machine. There’s a lot of good tips in there including:

• Getting temporary keys for products that aren’t licensed to your CBU
• Quieting your production system for an easier switchover
• Making sure you get a pre-switch backup
• Data integrity checking to make sure your CBU database matches your production database

Click here to read the article and get more information.

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Follow Joe Hertvik on Twitter @JoeHertvik. You can also add Joe to your professional network on LinkedIn by clicking here.

IT Jungle just posted my latest tip on how to load a digital certificate into an IBM i certificate store when your Digital Certificate Manager gives you this dreaded error message.

“An error occurred during certificate validation. The issuer of the certificate may not be in the certificate store or the issuer may not be enabled.”

This issue isn’t as difficult to solve as you might think. It only takes a few simple tools that you probably have lying around your house.

To see the solution to this issue and how it can help you load digital certificates into an IBM certificate, go to my tip at IT Jungle.

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Follow Joe Hertvik on Twitter @JoeHertvik. You can also add Joe to your professional network on LinkedIn by clicking here.

IT Jungle just posted my latest article detailing a checklist for monitoring IBM i systems. This piece builds on the checklist I started in October and adds several new items to the checklist.

This is a good starter checklist for monitoring for any developing problems that may be occurring on your IBM i partitions.

Click here to read the article.

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Follow Joe Hertvik on Twitter @JoeHertvik. You can also add Joe to your professional network on LinkedIn by clicking here.

Some of my technical cohorts and I were having a discussion as to whether you could tell what type of LTO tape you were holding by the color of the tape case.

After a quick google search (search: color lto tape), it turns out this is generally true. Each LTO tape type pretty much has a standard color but some manufacturers play games with the colors or just use a different color altogether.

Here’s what the tape drive colors seem to be and where certain tape manufacturers break with the standard. Continue reading →

Besides managing IBM i machines, I also run a PC and network Help Desk for two companies. Both companies use a Windows network combined with multiple IBM i servers. One of our biggest issues is fielding calls from users who have forgotten their passwords or locked their Windows Active Directory (Windows AD) accounts and IBM i user profiles when entering a wrong password several times in a row.

This is such a big issue for the Help Desk that ten percent of our calls are for disabled accounts or forgotten passwords. So I have a vested interest in reducing the number of password reset calls my Help Desk techs were fielding.

With that in mind, I’ve been testing ManageEngine’s ADSelfService Plus product that allows Windows users to reset forgotten passwords with the help of security questions; synchronize their IBM i user profile passwords with their reset Windows passwords; and unlock their Windows accounts and IBM i user profiles. We settled on prototyping ADSelfService Plus because we already use ManageEngine’s ADManager Plus product for Windows AD management and reporting.

Continue reading →

IT Jungle just published my latest tip on how to speed up an AS/400 Integrated File System (IFS) backup by breaking the backup into a full backup combined with incremental backups. In this piece, I also show green-screen and System i Navigator techniques for determining whether an IFS object has been modified.

Check out this tip by clicking here.

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Follow Joe Hertvik on Twitter @JoeHertvik. You can also add Joe to your professional network on LinkedIn by clicking here.

IT Jungle just published my latest article on moving Power i partitions to a new location. This information comes in handy when:

• Your company is sold or spun-off and your machine is moving to another location
• Your parent company is requiring all divisions to rehost their equipment in a centralized Data Center
• You’re consolidating Power i partitions to another machine in a different location
• You’re moving one or more Power i partitions to the cloud

There’s a lot of good starter information here if you find yourself in any of these situations.

You can read the article by clicking here.

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Follow Joe Hertvik on Twitter @JoeHertvik. You can also add Joe to your professional network on LinkedIn by clicking here.