Are You Ready for World IPv6 Day

June 8, 2011, is World IPv6 Day. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the Internet is full; although IPv6 has been around for some time now, it is not widely used.

World IPv6 Day is an event to help with the transition to IPv6. Tim Mullenbach, who works on the IBM i networking development team and has been the lead developer on IPv6 for several years, has written an excellent article on World IPv6 Day. In this article, Tim also reviews the IBM i IPv6 strategy and discusses the IBM i certifications for IPv6 enablement.

Within Tim's article is one important question – does your IBM i connect as a client to any of the participants host names in the IPv6 Day event? You should read Tim's article to determine if IPv6 Day could affect you.

 

 

New Years Wishes

It's hard to believe that I've been writing these blog articles for well over a year already! My objective has been to write about IBM i's latest enhancements and hidden features in these blog articles and I have a long list of topics yet to cover.

But I thought I'd like to take a step back and solicit input from my readers on what you would like to see. What would make this blog better? Do you like the focus on enhancements that IBM has made to i? The sometimes hard-to-find information on function added with PTFs? Do you have specific topics you'd like to see more information on?

Lately I have written about some topics that aren't new enhancements – such as the library locking level system value, history log changes, and the improved scalability of subsystems to support many devices. Were articles like this helpful to you? Should I continue to write about existing features as well as recent enhancements?

Your input and feedback will be appreciated. Posting your input as comments to this article would be a great way to have a discussion regarding future topics. But also feel free to send your feedback to me at [email protected].

It's interesting that I personally have discovered these articles to be a valuable reference for my own use, and that was rather unexpected! I don't always remember the details and generally look up information when I need it. I have found myself going back to the blogs over and over again. And it's wonderful when I get a question that I can answer simply be providing the link to information I had written.

I'd also like to take this time to thank my colleagues at IBM who have written articles for me. In general, my goal is to personally write more than half of the articles. But I don't have the breadth of knowledge to cover everything and thus rely on others for topics outside my personal areas of expertise.

This will be the last blog update of 2010. I'm looking forward to celebrating 1-1-11 (isn't that a great date!) and a wonderful 2011. Now if it would just stop snowing here!

 

 

 

Fall Conference Update

I'm giving several presentations at the Fall COMMON Conference in San Antonio this week. The fall conference this year is a bit different from the fall events that COMMON had the past couple years in that it's sort of a “mini” COMMON conference – a small expo and educational sessions over three days. The attendance at the conference is good and the attendance at my sessions has also been good; the questions/discussions/feedback I've gotten so far has been positive. Seating at breakfast and lunch today was somewhat crowded because of the good attendance, but that's a good problem to have. One of the other things I’ve observed is the many conference badges with green stickers denoting first-time attendees – it's wonderful to see those!

One of the things I always do at the beginning of my presentations is ask the audience what operating system release they’re using. My non-scientific results seem to show more and more of you are now on the 6.1 release, although many are still on 5.4.  Only a handful seems to be moving to 7.1 so far. If you are one of those shops still on 5.4, you have the question to consider – should you move to 6.1 or 7.1 for your next upgrade? 7.1 is most definitely worthy of serious consideration and would get you on the latest supported release of IBM i.

It's exciting when we've had so many new product announcements like we have had this year with POWER7 and the 7.1 release. It's important to provide education about the latest and greatest offerings.  But one thing I've learned is it’s also important to offer education on some of the other features that have been available for a long time. IBM i is so rich in its capabilities, no matter what the topic, I have discovered there’s a need for education. That's one of the nice things about the education COMMON offers; it has a good mix--focusing on what's new, but also providing education on key topics that, while not new, are of significant interest to users.  And it's because of this educational need that I write this blog – although, like this week, I sometimes vary off the technical path to provide thoughts on other topics.

Being active with the COMMON conferences has been a great way to meet and work with many of you in the IBM i community. I always appreciate the passion our users have for our products, and I especially look forward to comments about what you like, as well as input about what you think we can do better! Many times I'll talk with someone who’s having some problems and usually I haven't heard about the specific problem being discussed; in such cases, I'll generally recommend you work the issues through the Rochester, Minn. Support Center. They’re a great resource to use when you do have issues that need to be resolved.

There are a few other things going on this fall that I'll briefly mention:

The Large Users Group (LUG) is meeting in Rochester, Minn. this week. The LUG meeting generally consists of educational information between IBM and the LUG.

Coming in up just a couple weeks is the Power Systems Technical University. This conference has a very broad offering of educational sessions for Power Systems in general, along with technical information related to the operating environments that run on the Power hardware.

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit Vienna, Austria for “Rochester Day.” Ian Jarman and I attended and covered information relating to the latest in POWER7, IBM i 7.1, Systems Management Tools and High Availability Updates. It was a real treat to visit Vienna as I’d never been there before and I was very impressed with the city. It looks like there will be some additional events coming up in November for COMMON Europe as well, and in a future blog I hope to share more about them.

i Can … Attend COMMON Europe

Last week, I was fortunate to attend the COMMON Europe conference. Steve Will, Jenny Dervin and I were there from Rochester. We all gave several presentations at the conference, and afterward we attended the COMMON Europe Advisory Council (CEAC) face-to-face meeting. 

The conference was held in Stratford-upon-Avon, which I found to be a nice little community with an amazing amount of traffic! The conference was split between two hotels that were separated by a busy street. I don't think anyone suffered any injuries crossing the road, but patience was required. For those of us who don't routinely have roundabouts in our traffic patterns, we had to pay a little extra attention because we didn't know for sure which direction the cars would be going. I found the “Look Right” and “Look Left” words painted on the road at pedestrian crossing points to be very helpful!

The conference was quite a bit like the Annual COMMON Conference we have here in the U.S. There were several tracks of presentations running in parallel that attendees could choose from. Aside from being a much smaller event, the main difference from COMMON in the U.S. is that the sessions were only 60 minutes long, rather than 75. 15 minutes shorter doesn't sound like a big difference, but presentations prepared with 75 minutes in mind end up being a bit long for 60-minute sessions. There was also an expo and evening events. The Monday evening event was a group dinner at Warwick Castle, which was very entertaining with excellent food and a lot of fun; the magician was a big hit.

The CEAC meeting was a mix of educational information from IBM back to the group, as well as ongoing discussion about requirements and future directions. The requirements process is very important to both IBM and our customers as it definitely influences our investment decisions. Since we've just released 7.1, you can imagine that we’re relatively early in the development of our next release, when it's much easier to react to new requirements.

Steve, Jenny and I traveled together during the trip and did have a little free time while in Stratford-upon-Avon to do some sightseeing. We also took an extra day at the end of the trip to do “London in a day.” None of us had been to London before, so we spent the entire day walking and seeing the major sights – Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the London Eye, Tower Bridge.... Needless to say, our feet hurt by the end!

The trip there and back was uneventful, which is a good thing. On the flight home, I chatted with the young man sitting next to me; he was traveling from Ireland to Estes Park, Colorado, where he’s planning to spend the summer working as a lifeguard. Working as a lifeguard for the summer is something a lot of young people do, but not many travel quite so far for that summer job!

 

 

i Can … Say This is a Great Conference

It's been a busy week! The CAAC meeting, eight sessions, a two-slot Open Lab, Ask the Experts, Expo, the Power Down events …. I'm almost done! My last two sessions are at the end of the day today. I will admit, though, that the cold of the hotel is taking its toll on me – I didn't realize I should have brought my Minnesota cool-weather clothes to Florida! I do have a bit of free time today, so I am going to get outside and warm up a bit – in fact, this blog was written out by the pool.

This week has been a great week! Being more involved with the conference – being on the SET, speakingand having attended the past several conferences – has allowed me to get to know more and more people. It has been wonderful to reconnect with old acquaintances and meet new ones. I appreciate the feedback and comments on my sessions, as I'm always striving to improve the content – there are always new ideas, suggestions and creative questions.

Throughout the conference, I've also received input and had discussions on various aspects of the i operating system. You can be assured that I'll be taking that information back to the development lab for discussion and consideration as we work on our future features and enhancements.

I've heard good feedback on the overall content of the conference. There were a lot of sessions that were very well attended with packed rooms – sessions on the latest and greatest enhancements, along with sessions on the fundamentals that are important for everyone to know. And just a reminder: most of the handouts are on the COMMON website, so even after the conference is over, you can continue to learn by reviewing the handouts from sessions that you were unable to attend.

Last night's Power Down event was fun! Larry Bolhuis caught up with me in the hallway yesterday, and I could tell by his demeanor that he was going to ask me to do something. When he asked if I would be the IBM participant for the Jeopardy event, I couldn't say no. I will admit that at first I was a bit nervous about it – after all, I didn't want to look like a dumb blonde by getting too many answers wrong! But once the game got started, I knew it would be great fun! Congrats to Randy for the win!

Tonight's Power Down main event will be a good conclusion to the conference. I won't dress up in '60s garb, but I do plan to enjoy the event. As the conference draws to a conclusion, it does cause me to think there is something special with COMMON and the IBM i community that isn't found elsewhere in the industry.

i Can … Question the Answer?

Tuesday was another busy day. While I only had one presentation to give, I did have an open lab session, attended the IBM i Q&A, and worked in the Expo again.

I like the new organization for the open labs this year. In the past, each lab topic had dedicated time in a lab room. With the smaller number of conference rooms this year, rather than reduce the lab content, the labs were compressed into multiple lab sessions in the lab room at one time. This allowed COMMON to offer a good number of open labs in limited space. I thought this worked well.

The IBM i Q&A session was well attended and the questions were good. I'm sure Steve will write more about it, but there are a couple of observations I'd like to make. First, I particularly liked how a couple of people used the opportunity to give feedback on what they like, as well as their concerns. It's good to hear about what’s going well in addition to areas where improvements are needed. Second, Dave Nelson, Director of IBM i Development, took the opportunity to ask himself a question (it was a bit humorous!) about IBM's commitment and investment in IBM i. Dave is a tremendous advocate of i and is committed to sharing information with our users about IBM's commitment to i, as well as i's value to IBM.

One other topic came out of the IBM i Q&A regarding how IBM should communicate information to our customers. While we have our support site and the Information Center, often there are small pieces of communications that must be shared with our users. It was great to hear that the “You and i” and “i Can” blogs are well-received and are a good place to provide updates.

Today will be another busy day with a lot of sessions to chose from. I “only” have two presentations, but I have arranged a meeting with a client, and of course, the social event tonight. Speaking of which ...

Be sure to come to Fun and Games night tonight!

There's going to be a great COMMON Jeopardy event at the Fun and Games night. Nine contestants will compete in the classic Jeopardy game on topics that cover COMMON, speakers, IBMers, AS/400-iSeries-System i and Power Systems, as well as general computer topics. With more than 150 questions in 27 topic areas, there are sure to be questions for everyone to enjoy! It's not to be missed!

i Can …. Learn New Things and Plan for Today

We all know the COMMON Conference is an educational event. Yesterday was a very busy day for me and attending an extra session to learn about something new was not part of my plan for the day.  However ...

Yesterday got off to a surprise start that hadn't been part of the plan for the day. I was heading down to the fitness center and ran into someone that asked if I was going to run the 5K – so I decided, on the spur of the moment, to participate in the COMMON 5K Charity Run/Walk event. There was a good turnout for the event – and as we were waiting to start, I pondered …. walk fast? Or try to run? You see, while I exercise on a regular basis, I have never been a runner. I decided to give running a try. I surprised myself by running the whole way and finished in 33 minutes! I think I might have to try this again.

Yesterday's Opening Session was well attended. While at the Opening Session, I also learned something I had long wondered about … where did COMMON get its name? There must be some significance to the name “COMMON.”  Ross Mauri talked about the IBM 1620, one of the computers being used when the user group was formed back in 1960, and how Fortran was its programming language. Apparently, Fortran has something called a “COMMON” area, and the fledgling user group used that as its name. So for those of you who aren't at the conference, and have wondered about COMMON's name, you too now know.

Finally, while working at the Expo yesterday I made a couple observations … I was working at the IBM Systems Management pedestal, and the interest in IBM Systems Director is increasing from what I've seen in the past. Partitioning is very common and there's a growing use of AIX in IBM i shops that is causing people to look for a better way to manage all those partitions and operating systems. 

Looking forward to today, the conference agenda is full of educational sessions in many areas – in fact, too many to review or highlight. But there are three things on the agenda I'd like to mention:

“Become a Speaker at COMMON” – If you're at all interested in sharing your knowledge with others and perhaps speaking at COMMON, attend this session and learn more about it. My first time speaking at COMMON was in the late ’90s. Looking back, I was horribly nervous and wondered why I volunteered to do this!

“Power Tips” – IBM is trying another way to create and share educational information about IBM i though what is being called “Power Tips.” It's a way for the larger IBM i community to share tips, techniques and best practices with others. It's very easy to do and won't take much time – I encourage you to share your secret tips.

“IBM i Q&A” – I know I mentioned this session in yesterday's blog, but I wanted to point it out again today. This is a great opportunity for you to ask questions about IBM i.

For those of you who are unable to attend the conference, I hope you find these updates interesting and helpful.

i Can … Plan My Week at COMMON

During this week at the COMMON conference, I'm going to take a break from my usual technical updates and write about my experiences at the conference. Also, I plan to provide a blog update each day during the conference, so check back daily for the latest news.

I'm really looking forward to this week at COMMON. We have a lot of great new functions with our 7.1 release that you’ll be able to learn about. The agenda also includes sessions on many important features IBM i provides. There's also the opportunity to learn about things beyond the i – as  COMMON has broadened its conference sessions to include many things you may want to learn about for best utilizing IBM Power Systems software and hardware. And of course, today's Opening Session is not to be missed!

This COMMON experience is a new one for me. During the past several months, I've had the opportunity to be part of COMMON's Strategic Education Team (SET). There are three of us from IBM that participate on the SET, and I became the lead IBMer on this team this year. It gave me a chance to see how the COMMON conference comes together, and the ability to guide and influence the agenda content, along with ensuring we have great IBM speakers attend the conference. I hope you find the learning opportunities to meet your needs.

I’ll be working in the IBM booth during the expo sessions. I'll be at the Systems Management pedestal, demonstrating the capabilities of IBM Systems Director, IBM Systems Director Navigator, and the Performance Data Investigator. Feel free to stop by and introduce yourself, and see our latest systems-management solutions.  Also be sure to check out all of the other pedestals in the IBM booth to see our latest and greatest hardware and software offerings. I'll also be at “Ask the Experts” on Monday evening, at the performance table.  And you can find all of my sessions in the online session guide; my focus at this conference is talking about the IBM i performance tools, which have been a major focus of my job at IBM for the past several years.

I also want to mention Steve Will's sessions at this conference; Steve will be presenting the IBM i 7.1 Overview, which provides a broad review of the major new content in our new release. Steve also has a great presentation on “Why i.”  If you’re a loyal i user, you may not need the information Steve covers in this session, but this presentation may be something you want to take back to your company to share with others that perhaps aren't as familiar with the value that IBM i provides. 

The IBM i Q&A session on Tuesday is one we want to encourage you to attend and ask your questions or provide constructive input.

Over the weekend before the start of the conference, I attended the COMMON America's Advisory Council (CAAC) meeting. The CAAC represents COMMON in working with IBM to understand our product plans and providing input and guidance for decisions we make. I won't write much about the meeting, as I expect Steve will cover it, but I'm impressed with the interaction and positive influence that comes out of this relationship.

One thing I want to mention is COMMON members can submit requirements to IBM through the COMMON website:  Members only → Requirements.  There is also a requirements booth across from the registration center where you can submit your requirements. There’s a session on Wednesday—COMMON Americas Advisory Council Requirements Update—that will give feedback on requirements submitted to IBM from COMMON members.  I'm an IBM “catcher” of many requirements and encourage the use of this process.

Finally, I was able to attend the IBM Systems Magazine's appreciation party on Sunday evening.  It was a great fun catching up with people I hadn't seen since last year, and meeting others.

This week is going to be very busy, but I think it's going to be a great conference!

i Can … Share the Secrets of 7.1

Finally, the time has come when I can start talking about our 7.1 release!  It's not been a secret that 7.1 would be available this year, but other than the high-level statements of direction, no details about the release were shared publicly.  Now we can start to share the details.

I'm not going to cover the topics that the announcement material covers since you can get that information in other ways. Steve Will's "You and i" blog covers the major announcement highlights. You can also learn more about IBM i 7.1 through the “Power of  i” Webcast Series. In addition, the sessions at the annual COMMON conference in Orlando will be updated to cover 7.1 content.

I'm going to summarize many of the little things that are new or changed in the release – and some of these are significant enhancements that simply didn’t make the “short list” of the announcement. Much of this information is covered in the “What's new for IBM i 7.1” summaries in the IBM i 7.1 Information Center.  However, there’s simply too much to summarize in this single blog. Future blogs will go into more detail on many of these topics and more.

There's a lot of great stuff  in 7.1!

IBM Systems Director Navigator for i

IBM Systems Director Navigator for i was new with the 6.1 release, and there are several major enhancements to it in the 7.1 release.  These enhancements include:

•    Set Target System: you can now manage multiple IBM i partitions and are no longer limited to just managing the i partition the browser is pointed to. This also allows you to manage 6.1 and 5.4 (yes – even 5.4) partitions from the 7.1 environment.
•    5250 emulation: you can now get a “green screen” window from your Web browser.
•    Performance Data Investigator: the Investigate Data task has a few new charts and tables, but what's really exciting is the integration between the Work Management tasks and the Performance tasks. For example, from Active jobs, you can go directly to Job Watcher. Or from System Status you can go directly to the new Health Indicators.
•    The iSCSI integrated-server tasks are now available in this Web console and this is now the preferred interface for managing integrated servers.
•    Scheduling support has been added for BRMS.

Additional functions and tasks have been added:

•    Graphical view of disk: System i Navigator had the “graphical view” for disks. This feature is now also available via the Web browser
•    Directory server tasks
•    Advanced job scheduler enhancements
•    Tape device support
•    Journal management enhancements

Print and Spool Enhancements

•    The security of spooled files has been enhanced to allow more granular access to individual spooled files, as well as controlling the operations that a user can take on the spooled file.
•    You can now convert spooled output files to PDF files. There’s support to do this in the IBM Systems Director Navigator for i Web console.  It does not require the IBM Infoprint Server for i.

TCP/IP Application Enhancements

•    You now have the option to use the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) implementation of DHCP version 4. This version of the DHCP provides support for IPv6 and supports failover between two DHCP server peers.
•    The IBM Tivoli Directory Server is equivalent to the IBM Tivoli Directory Server Version 6.1.  It includes too many enhancements to cover here.
•    The SNMP server is now Version 3, which is the latest version defined by the IETF. This version of SNMP provides support for IPv6 and several new MIBs.
•    PPP, L2TP, and the DHCP client now support IPv6.
•    Communications trace now has support for filtering on IPv6 addresses and support for ICMPv6.

DB2

•    Various application development enhancements have been made; MERGE, array support, global variables and more allow for more powerful and efficient programming.
•    The SQL Query Engine (SQE) now supports native logical files.
•    Management tooling continues to be enhanced as well.

BRMS
The BRMS enhancements are primarily driven by customer requirements from our Large Users Group or one of the various advisory councils. The 7.1 release has many BRMS enhancements that are too numerous to mention here.

iSCSI-attached Integrated Servers

•    iSCSI software target allows IBM i to communicate with the integrated services through a standard Ethernet connection, rather than requiring the host based adapter (HBA) cards.
•    VMWare ESX Server 4 is now supported.

CL Enhancements
Like the recent releases, IBM has continued to invest in CL in 7.1. Some of the CL enhancements include:

•    Retrieve CL Source support for ILE CL
•    Longer integer CL variables for ILE CL
•    Compiler option to show DO loop and SELECT group nesting levels in compiler listing
•    Encrypted debug listing view support for ILE LC
•    Nested INCLUDE support

Security
Support to expire a user profile has been added. If a user profile hasn’t been used by an expiration date or within an expiration interval, the system will automatically disable the user profile.

Web Infrastructure

•    The Classic JVM is no longer available.
•    The Integrated Web Services server now supports programs in iASPs.
•    The integrated GUI interface is now available to users and developers.  *ALLOBJ special authority is no longer required.
•    The Web Log monitor allows you to watch for errors and messages written to your Web server log files and receive notification when a match is found.

Disk Encryption
If you had been using encrypted ASPs, you know that in 6.1, you could only set the encryption capability when you defined the ASP.  Now in 7.1, you can dynamically start and end encryption on an ASP.

Performance Data
Many new metrics are collected by collection services. We now collect metrics for tape devices, save/restore metrics, external storage metrics, energy management settings, active memory sharing, etc.

Message Watches
You can now watch for immediate or impromptu messages, watch for *ALL messages sent to a message queue or job log, and watch on generic message IDs. Messages can also be watched based upon message severity.

Service

•    Verify Service Configuration (VFYSRVCFG) command now supports HTTP/HTTPS connections to IBM.
•    Universal Connection support now automatically configures a direct LAN connection to IBM if there’s no existing Universal Connection configuration. This auto-configuration is attempted the first time any attempt is made to connect to IBM Service and no service configuration exists.

There's much more in 7.1 than what I've summarized above; for example, journal is an area that has so many changes I'm unable to reasonably summarize them here.

I hope you find many of these enhancements interesting and perhaps some of these features will make you want to think about moving to the 7.1 release. I'm looking forward to telling you much more about all the great things in 7.1!

i Can ... Remember Craig

I was going to title this “Say Goodbye to Craig,” but I don't want to say goodbye. Rather, I want to remember all of the good things that he brought to the IBM i community and the contributions to our team at IBM.

Craig's humor and intelligence were always inspirational to me. He had a great gift for weaving humor into his technical presentations. One of my favorite examples of his humor is when he talked about IBM i security. He would show a slide and explain that the picture of a large number of people was of the presenters at a Microsoft Security conference. He would then show a slide of the attendees of an IBM i security conference – a handful of people enjoying the beach! His presentation style was great and he had a talent for taking dry, technical material and making it understandable and entertaining.

Craig was an IBM i advocate and champion of the community. He recognized that the i ecosystem is much more than people using technology – that there's a culture within the i community that goes beyond technology. That's one reason Craig was a great supporter of starting these blogs. We wanted to have a link from the IBM development lab out to that IBM i community. Craig worked with the editors at IBM Systems Magazine to get these blogs started. Craig would joke with me about getting my blog out on time every week, while he had it easy and only had to get one done a month.

Craig was also a key contributor to our IBM i software release plan. Those of us on the team, led by Steve Will, work on determining what features will be in the next software release. We relied upon Craig's knowledge of the marketplace to validate our plans – or to tell us what we were missing.

My fondest memory of Craig is when we attended the COMMON Europe Advisory Council (CEAC) meeting in Barcelona. We had a free afternoon, so Craig, Guy Havelick and I went to the Picasso museum, then found a nice spot outside of the Santa Maria Del Mar and spent the rest of the afternoon sipping Sangrias, people watching and simply enjoying the day. Maybe it was the beautiful weather and the wonderful location – or maybe it was because we had a couple too many sangrias - but we had a great afternoon enjoying Barcelona and laughing and talking.

I'm fortunate to have known and worked with Craig; he will truly be missed. My heart goes out to his family and my thoughts are with them.