There's a tool for that!

A New TAA Tools Refresh Is Available

Our April 15, 2020 refresh (R71) of TAA Tools is ready. This refresh supports IBM i releases 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4, and contains 2 new tools to help with system maintenance and consistency over time. The refresh also contains many fixes and enhancements.

Check out our latest release notes for full details.

Complete documentation for all our tools is on our web site. Always check for tools that can help you before starting a new project. We may have something that will lighten your load. Good places to start are our category page or searching our index page.

Call 507-258-5182 or email support@taatool.com to order your refresh. We can either email you a download link or ship it to you on CD.

Why do we call this a "refresh"?

We do a simultaneous update of the tools across all of the underlying supported releases of the IBM i Operating System. To call this a release or version would confuse it with the VRM numbering of the IBM i OS, since we refresh the tools far more often. You could consider this our parallel to IBM's Technical Refreshes for IBM i, but our refreshes apply to multiple VRMs of the IBM i OS.

New Tools

CVTCERT

The Convert Certificates command produces an outfile of information from server or CA certificates on your system including their certificate expiration dates. This gives administrators an easy way of checking which certificates need to be renewed before they expire.

CVTACCPTH

The Convert Access Path command produces an outfile of physical and logical files which have a 4 GB maximum access path limit. The outfile can be checked for files which are approaching their 4 GB limit. Why is this important? Files created by older version of the operating system usually had ACCPTHSIZ set to *MAX4GB by default. Also, many early files created by third-party software vendors were created with *MAX4GB as the default. When a *MAX4GB file hits the 4GB limit, it will stop accepting updates and your application will crash. Use of CVTACCPTH to check access path sizes gives you time to change the access path sizes before that happens.

New Support For Supplemental Licenses

This article appeared in our last newsletter, but it bears repeating because of the continued interest in the topic.

The tools can now support multiple licenses on a single system. This makes it much easier to manage cases where the system image must be switched or replicated to a system with a different serial number. This would include cases for capacity backup (CBU), disaster recovery (DR), high availability (HA), or live partition mobility (LPM).

You can install supplemental licenses in addition to the base license on your primary system. The base license is created either during install or with CHGTAAKEY. Its serial number must match the system at that time. Supplemental licenses are installed on that same primary system but those can reference the serial numbers of the secondary systems. If a license check fails for the base license, the supplemental licenses are checked.

The base license resides in the TAATOOL/TAALICENSE data area. There can be up to 9 supplemental licenses in TAATOOL named TAALIC_001 through TAALIC_009. You create a supplemental license using the CHGTAAKEY command as follows:

CHGTAAKEY KEY(<key value for alternate system>) LICNBR(1)

This creates a supplemental license in the TAATOOL/TAALIC_001 data area.

When the secondary system is used, the base license and supplemental licenses are available since they've been replicated or switched. The base license check will fail, but the supplemental license check will succeed. This will be entirely transparent to you.

Featured Tool - CVTTCPJOB

Convert TCP Job (CVTTCPJOB) collects information about jobs connected to a particular port. These server jobs typically have a job user of QUSER and the interesting bit, the current user, is not immediately available from the system displays. CVTTCPJOB includes this current user information it its outfile. The tool converts one or more jobs connected to a specific port and outputs the information to file TCPJOBP in the library of your choice.

Certain connection types have standard port numbers. For example, ODBC uses port 8471 and Telnet uses port 23. CVTTCPJOB allows an easy view of how these ports are being used.

CVTTCPJOB has proven to be one of most requested new tools -- a favorite system administrators use to get information on system connections and their usage. Suggestions for improvements to this tool (or any of our tools) are always welcome!