Readers are interacting online in our blogs, forums, and articles. Here, we present some excerpts of their comments unedited and in their own words.

on our website . . .

Configuring Apache for Security

Great article on Apache configurations! The one thing I would note about basic authentication using user profiles is that the previous sign-on date and time on the user profile do not get updated. If that information is part of your IT auditing procedures, you can use the QSYCHGPR API to update it in your web application.
—from "Securing Directories, Files, and Applications with Apache"

in our blogs . . .

Offshoring . . . to the Cloud?

Not to be a stick in the mud, but:

"but then, someone has to be working at the company providing the cloud services."

Most likely not in the US, that's where the cost savings are. The jobs getting offshored aren't being replaced by anything with similar salary levels in most cases. So great - you save a few bucks on your winery software by using the new offshore cloud, but you kill off your US customer base by encouraging their unemployment. Mutiply that by a million or so businesses and do the math on what that does to the US economy. Which is kinda just what we are seeing now. http://www.madnamerica.com
—from "IBM Finds Smart Business Offerings in the Cloud"

Origin of Servers

If we all take a copy of this wonderful story from Joe and pass it to CFO's - not I.T Director's or I.T Managers if they are MicroSoft people. We just may have a few CFO's asking questions. We all know what Joe to be saying is true, however for years we have all been told we need to play fair with MicroSoft. Well I say that time is over! We need to go after the people in the company's that are seeing the bills created by the MicroSoft infrastructure. Have the CFO's request we break out the I.T budget by system so they can see the real TCO.
—from "In Honor of National Novel Writing Month: An IBM i Tale for the Ages"

brilliant writing, Joe. I don't know whether to call this truly great science fiction or horror. It's so true it's scary!
—from "In Honor of National Novel Writing Month: An IBM i Tale for the Ages"

This is just too cool a story not to share with everyone you know. Perhaps some of our colleagues who don't remember the System/3 or System/38 will read it and wonder, "Could some of this stuff actually be true?" Nice work, Mr. Kennedy! —from "In Honor of National Novel Writing Month: An IBM i Tale for the Ages"

in our forums . . .

Availability Is No Longer a Luxury

Just read this article and I want to thank Lynne and Vlad for a very interesting, readable article. The detail behind all the issues and how they were resolved makes all the difference.

It's a virtual poster story for anyone not having a high availability backup system to buy a new iseries and use current box for the high availability backup. (or buying a new or used system for the backup, especially with the special HA backup licencing available from IBM and third party vendors)

Keep up the good work, SystemiNews!
—from a post about the System iNEWS article "Stories from the Trenches: When Our 520 Went Down"

Great story. Back in the S/38 days, I worked for a cruise line that ran a reservation system on the 38. We too feared losing reservations if the system crashed. We took the simple but effective route of connecting a cheap 80-column dot matrix printer to the 38 and configuring it without spooling. The instant a reservation was assigned a number and contact information entered, a message was sent to a message queue which triggered a program to print a single line to the printer with reservation number, date, time and contact. Just enough so we could call the travel agent back and not lose the business. It saved us more than once, albeit at the expense of a few trees
—from a post about the System iNEWS article "Stories from the Trenches: When Our 520 Went Down"

We record all our calls (not on the I); we could have gotten the reservations back (and did for the 3 not yet written to tables.) But we would have had to stop taking calls, at least via the call center system, until the 520 was back up.

I lost a System 38 in the late 80's in the afternoon (16 hours after a good backup.) The estimated cost (80's dollars) was $300,000.

Data is harder to lose now, but being down is worse.
—from a post about the System iNEWS article "Stories from the Trenches: When Our 520 Went Down"

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