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A New TAA Tools Refresh Is Available

Our May 15, 2021 refresh (R72) 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 performance. The refresh also contains many fixes and enhancements. Of particular note is the critical fix for the DLTUSRPRF3 tool.

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.

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

CPUMON

The CPU Monitor tool checks jobs that consume CPU resources above a specified CPU percentage.

RTVJOBSPLC

The Retrieve Job Spool Count tool will efficiently return the number of spooled files created in a job. This count includes files in FIN state and so can be used to compare against the system value QMAXSPLF to see if a job is near the system specified limit.

Featured Tool - AUDLOG

The system audit journal, QAUDJRN, is your essential resource for monitoring security on your system. The Audit Log tool is a set of commands that let you work with the audit log entries from the QAUDJRN journal. You may either display the entries using several different access paths or print the entries using different selection and sequencing criteria. Audit logs from multiple systems may be stored in the same data base.

The documentation for AUDLOG is extensive. There is also a tutorial on auditing on our site as well.

Enjoy better security with AUDLOG.

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.