Submitted by Tom Huntington on Mon, 10/26/2009 - 7:52am
I am Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services at Help/Systems, LLC, and a 20-plus year veteran of the company. During that time, I have traveled almost 900,000 air miles via Northwest/Delta Airlines and visited more than 30 countries to talk to customers about computer automation, backups, security, business intelligence, development practices, quality, and family life.
Submitted by Tom Huntington on Wed, 02/01/2012 - 10:53am
On January 26, we released Robot/NETWORK version 11 in limited shipment. This release offers Robot product metrics, which can help organizations analyze and answer questions about how they use their Robot products. These metrics are designed to help our users run their data centers more efficiently.
Submitted by Tom Huntington on Thu, 01/26/2012 - 10:27am
How many of us have more than one coffee maker, hand drill, waffle maker, radio, or other music devices (iPod, stereo, and so forth)? We can't use all of them at once and they clutter up our countertop or home. Should we get rid of duplicates?
At home, it may be okay to have duplicates, but at work can we really afford to run processes that do the same thing? How many of us have multiple performance collection or disk collection processes? What is their impact on your system? They can be the reason you're experiencing performance degradation or need more disk space.
Submitted by Tom Huntington on Wed, 01/18/2012 - 11:20am
Last week, my sailing lessons culminated in a sailing trip around the British Virgin Islands. Overall it was a great vacation, as I sailed over 170 nautical miles (196 landlubber miles) with my crew of 6. We snorkeled, ate lobster, admired sea turtles, watched native stilt dancers, (or did we watch sea turtles and admire native stilt dancers?), sailed, and swam throughout this beautiful area.
The Captain's Role
Believe it or not, I was the captain. Among other responsibilities, the captain has to read the charts (maps) to avoid restricted areas (usually shallow waters). We had a few of these areas to watch out for. For example, you must steer clear of the Trellis Bay area airport because your mast could get clipped by an airplane. (That’s not good—among other things, it means that you lose the chance for any future boat rentals.)
Submitted by Tom Huntington on Wed, 01/11/2012 - 11:22am
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how large the IFS (Integrated File System) is getting on some IBM i servers. To refresh, the IFS is basically a directory system in IBM i disk space that lets you store data in UNIX and Windows formats. You’ll usually find data from applications such as SAP, EnterpriseOne, and Movex Enterprise Resource Planning. You’ll also find data stored in Windows formats such as PDF, XLS, GIF, and JPG.
As the IFS has grown on your server, it’s become a significant part of your backup and recovery plans because it takes longer and longer to back up and restore. If you want to speed things up, you need to split up the backups. But, for the typical IBM i administrator, this can be tough because IFS backups and restores don’t use the same syntax as traditional library backups.
I am Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services at Help/Systems, LLC, and a 20-plus year veteran of the company. During that time, I have traveled almost 900,000 air miles via Northwest/Delta Airlines and visited more than 30 countries to talk to customers about computer automation, backups, security, business intelligence, development practices, quality, and family life.
On January 26, we released Robot/NETWORK version 11 in limited shipment. This release offers Robot product metrics, which can help organizations analyze and answer questions about how they use their Robot products. These metrics are designed to help our users run their data centers more efficiently.
How many of us have more than one coffee maker, hand drill, waffle maker, radio, or other music devices (iPod, stereo, and so forth)? We can't use all of them at once and they clutter up our countertop or home. Should we get rid of duplicates?
Last week, my sailing lessons culminated in a sailing trip around the 
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how large the IFS (Integrated File System) is getting on some IBM i servers. To refresh, the IFS is basically a directory system in IBM i disk space that lets you store data in UNIX and Windows formats. You’ll usually find data from applications such as SAP, EnterpriseOne, and Movex Enterprise Resource Planning. You’ll also find data stored in Windows formats such as PDF, XLS, GIF, and JPG.