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This is a weird one, and it’s been plaguing me for months. You fire up IBM i Access Client Solutions and open a 5250 session, expecting a lovely crisp green screen. What you get instead looks like someone spilled a tin of custard over your monitor. Everything is washed out in a hideous, eye-watering yellow. …
October 2026 in Review: The Month the PTFs Arrived Before the Paperwork Right, kettle on, and possibly the big teapot. October was a busy month for security, and it had a pattern. Again and again, a “Security, all users” PTF turned up in the PSP files first, and the bulletin explaining it arrived days or …
Yesterday, I had one of those wonderfully misleading IBM i problems, the kind where the error message sends you charging off in one direction, only for the real answer to be hiding somewhere completely different. A client was printing truck loading labels when the batch routine crashed. The job log contained this little gem: So …
Thinking about becoming a Freelance IBM-i Consultant? Have you ever asked yourself, “Can I ditch the permanent job and become a Freelance IBM i Consultant?” You are not alone. Plenty of experienced RPG programmers reach a point where the permanent job no longer feels like the best fit. Maybe the company is stuck on old …
BOB Moves Indoors, PTFs Pile Up, and IBM Wants a Bit More Money in 2027 Another fortnight, another pot of tea, another pile of IBM i news. This roundup covers 20 September to 4 October 2026. I’ve made three piles: AI coding tools moving inside the firewall, the usual steady run of security patches, and …
This week I am helping a client migrate their trusty old AS/400 to a shiny brand-new Power System in the Cloud – disclaimer “they call it an AS400, not me” 😉 This glorious old machine has been quietly running IBM-i V7R1, unattended in the corner of a darkened office for a decade. The system admin …
VPN, in plain English A VPN is a private tunnel across the public internet. Think of the internet as a busy high street. Without a VPN, your staff walk that street carrying the company keys. Anyone standing nearby can watch. With a VPN they go through a locked corridor. Same destination. Far fewer strangers. That …
I am in the middle of helping a client lift a physical Power System out of the computer room and onto a cloud IBM i partition. Same workloads. Same legacy ERP system (RPG, CL and AS400 style physical files) that have paid the bills for years. The transition should be seamless to the end users. …
Firstly, ‘Sorry for writing so many blogs about IBM BOB‘ in recent months, but it really has been a complete game changer for me over the last year. It has turned the daily grind of staring at dusty fixed-format RPG into something almost enjoyable (honestly!). What used to take hours of head-scratching and strong tea …
IBM i ACS 1.1.9.14 is now available – a security-focused update you should apply promptly. IBM released ACS 1.1.9.14 on 5 August 2026 (build 6320), and this is primarily a security-focused update, not a feature release. This might not look like an exciting feature-packed release, but it is important. Even though there are no new …
From AS/400 Fossils to Modern IBM i SQL: The Practical Path That Doesn’t Break Everything I’ve just knocked out a short series of practical lessons on dragging classic AS/400 databases into the 21st century with proper IBM i SQL [more] We’re taking those ancient DDS Physical Files and Logical Files and turning them into grown-up …
There is a special breed of IBM i programmer who will fight you to the death over the name of the box. Call it an IBM i Power system and watch their blood pressure climb. Mention Power Systems running IBM i and they start twitching. No, they insist, it is still an AS/400, always has …
