Day: January 26, 2021

We’ve had a lot of questions recently on how to safely remove an IBM i root directory share in NetServer. Until IBM i 7.4, the only way to do it practically is a little cavalier. You essentially pick a time of day that isn’t too busy, inform your users, and then break the root share in a controlled fashion. How do you break it? Well, you can remove the share or make it read-only, and then you see who complains. If the complaints are minimal, you service those users by finding out what they used to do, then show them the new way. Most likely they’re heading for a subdirectory via the root share so creating them a direct share is the most appropriate course of action.

In IBM i 7.4, we can safely determine if a root share is in use by turning on Authority Collection for the root. We do that with the following command:

CHGAUTCOL OBJ(/) AUTCOLVAL(*OBJINF)…

Virtualization is something AS/400/iSeries/IBM i has been doing for a very long time. Work can be separated into various subsystems. Each workload can work with a different pool of memory. Jobs can run with different CPU priorities and time slices. Multiple libraries of the same name can exist when separated into multiple independent auxiliary storage pools. Along with all the job virtualization came the ability to virtualize the hardware; allowing you to have a hosting partition to share disk, network, tape, and optical. Then came a whole new operating system based on AIX designed with the sole purpose to virtualize the hardware. That operating system is Virtual I/O Server (VIOS).…

The IBM Full System Flash Copy (FSFC) for IBM i was created to automate performing backups with minimal impact to a production LPAR. With this toolkit, a full system backup in a restricted state can be performed with the users experiencing a pause for (typically) less than 30 seconds.

This is achieved using a combination of the HMC to manage the partitions, the ability of IBM i to pause database transactions on a commit boundary, and the FlashCopy function of external storage to create a copy of the production LPAR, from which the backups are taken.…