There's a tool for that!

A New TAA Tools Refresh Is Available

Our June 15, 2022 refresh (R73) of TAA Tools is ready. This refresh supports IBM i releases 7.3, 7.4, and the newly minted 7.5. It contains two new tools and a host of 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.

We have completely redone our install instructions to include screen-by-screen illustrations. If you are unfamiliar with the install procedures please check them out.

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. You can also download your refresh from our new "self-service keys" site! See below.

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.

IBM i 7.5!

Refresh 73 adds IBM i 7.5 to our family of supported releases!

IBM has made a couple of changes in IBM i 7.5 that affect the results returned by the tools. The tools have been modified in Refresh 73 in to accommodate these changes so that the results remain compatible with previous IBM i releases.

If you are migrating from a previous IBM i release such as 7.3 or 7.4 to IBM i 7.5 you should update your tools before migrating, otherwise you will notice issues with CVTEDTD, CVTIFSAUT2, DSPIFSOWN, CVTIFSOWN and tools that depend on them.

In IBM i 7.5 CVTEDTD was affected by a spooled file output change. IBM added single quotation marks around some fields. Prior to this refresh CVTEDTD assumed that the field values would be unquoted. In Refresh 73 CVTEDTD now properly "unquotes" quoted fields.

CVTIFSAUT2, DSPIFSOWN, and CVTIFSOWN were affected by a change to the QSYLOBJA API in IBM i 7.5. It now reports IFS path names in CCSID 1200 rather than the job CCSID. This is technically not incompatible with previous releases since the CCSID is also a reported attribute. CVTIFSAUT2 and DSPIFSOWN were modified in Refresh 73 to account for this change. The change for CVTIFSOWN did not make it into Refresh 73, but we have provided a patch for CVTIFSOWN that reports the path names in the job CCSID as before.

Self-Service Keys!

You can now get your keys and downloads from our new keys web site. You can get 90 days of temporary keys per year for any system and permanent keys for any system that is currently under maintenance. This is a great way to

download the latest refreshes
get temporary keys for disaster recovery and DR testing

CHECK IT OUT!

New Tools

CPYSRCFIFS
This tool will copy selected members of source files in a library into the IFS. It is meant to provide an easy way to populate an IFS directory from source physical files. You may wish to do this if comparing sources across systems or when you wish to establish a source directory usable with Source Control Management tool that operates on Unix or Windows style directories.

RUNTAABLDR
This command will compile and run a builder program for a tool. All new tools are written with these builder programs, allowing them to be easily patched onto existing systems.

Support For Supplemental Licenses

This article appeared in previous newsletters, 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.