IBM i computer, formerly named AS/400, iSeries, i5

Tips for Fast, Reliable Open Source on IBM i

Open source continues to gain traction in IBM i shops, and for good reason. It excels at delivering new interfaces and functionality for RPG and COBOL applications, plus it broadens the talent pool for your development team.

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Use IBM’s Apache Directive Finder Instead of Google

Apache HTTP Server ProjectWhen it comes to finding information on HTTP Server for IBM i (based on Apache), Google is NOT the way to go!

Recently Calvin did a web search for Apache’s ServerUserID directive. It returned old forum posts that could have taken anyone down a rabbit hole—a waste of time at best.

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Requests for Enhancement are now “IBM Ideas”

IBM iIBM i users have a new way to request enhancements from IBM. The Request for Enhancement (RFE) site has been replaced by the IBM Power Ideas Portal.

I immediately noticed an advantage of the new portal—we can now share links without requiring the recipient to log in! The new site seems faster, too.

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What’s in Your ODBC Driver?

ODBC with Db2 for IBM iSince IBM announced Yum support for installing the IBM i Db2 ODBC driver, as documented in our recent tutorial, users can update their driver more easily.

To help users determine what’s changed, IBM maintains a list of fixes and enhancements for each IBM i ODBC driver release.

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IBM Announces IBM i 7.5 and 7.4 TR6

IBM iThe May 3, 2022 announcement of IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.4 TR6 gave us a lot to unpack. It rolled up many enhancements from previous TRs, then threw in a new subscription option for IBM i and a new modernization framework called Merlin.

If you’re running Seiden’s CommunityPlus+ PHP, no worries. It’s compatible with IBM i 7.5.

Here’s a collection of the articles and podcasts we found to be most informative for IBM i application development teams.

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New IBM i extension for PHP

PHP on IBM iOne of the open source components we’ve built at Seiden Group is a new extension to enhance PHP’s integration with IBM i.

Although most business requirements are met by the existing ibm_db2 and PDO_ODBC extensions plus the PHP Toolkit, the new php-ibmi makes it easier to accomplish several (formerly) difficult or impossible tasks—especially for tool vendors, and when troubleshooting.

We’ve built six functions thus far, with the possibility of more in the future. Let us know what you think.

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Troubleshooting “already been bootstrapped” Message on IBM i

Setting up the open source environment on IBM i from Access Client Solutions (ACS) is usually easy, but sometimes you can run into problems. The most common error is when ACS claims that the environment is already set up (“bootstrapped”), when in fact it isn’t.

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Solving “curl#6 – getaddrinfo() thread failed to start”

Curl-logoIf you download files onto your system using PHP, Yum, RPM, or other tools, there’s a good chance curl is involved, be it part of a library (such as PHP’s curl extension and the Guzzle HTTP client) or called on its own.

The version of curl provided in IBM i PASE uses multiple threads to speed up common tasks such as DNS lookups. When threading support is not available, however, curl fails.

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Using PHP with Rational Developer for IBM i

open phpIf you’re using Rational Developer for i (RDi) for most of your development tasks, you might want to use it for PHP, too. RDi is based on Eclipse, so we can use the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) with RDi.

However, there are some additional steps to take and quirks to be aware of. This post provides the steps for a trouble-free installation of PDT, with tips to resolve common issues.

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Reading and Writing Physical Files in a Shell using Rfile

Want to read source member data from within an IBM i shell environment, such as SSH, QShell, or QP2TERM? Need to copy records from a text file to a physical file? Want a quick way to upload a save file without needing FTP?

IBM i’s Rfile command can do all these things easily. Rfile is designed to be easy to integrate into scripts, so it’s a great tool to have at hand.

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