Whether you're backing up, deploying multiple Linux and Windows desktops, or cloning your installation to a larger drive, Ghost for Linux (G4L) can be very helpful.

By Max Hetrick

One can never have too many backups, trust me. Whether you want to create full disk and partition backups or you want to clone drives for deployment purposes, many commercial programs are available to help you. Chances are you've used Norton's Ghost utility to create full-disk image backups, partition backups, or file-based snapshots of your hard drives. There is an alternative, however, and Ghost for Linux (G4L) is a slightly trimmed-down open-source equivalent of Norton's product that's maintained by Michael Setzer.

There is no easy way to monitor the growth of QTEMP or temporary storage consumption.

by Tom Huntington

"Hey, John, something is chewing up the disk space again on the System i. What library is it that's growing?" John replies, "I don't think it's a library. I ran the PRTDSKINFO command again, and it just finished after eight hours. No libraries are growing! Maybe we'll need to IPL and stop whatever is gobbling up disk space." The manager replies, "Not that again! We can't in the middle of month-end. There has to be a better way."

By Max Hetrick

Many of you have heard me and fellow author Barry L. Kline mention the Nagios utility in the past. While I implement Nagios on my networks to diligently monitor everything from host devices to services, it's not necessarily always easy and convenient to implement event handlers to act on problems; Nagios has a very steep learning curve. So if you just want a simple utility designed specifically to restart services and act on behalf of conditions you have set forth, consider Monit instead. Monit can provide automated recovery of services and processes on a Linux system in very simple fashion.

Do your developers and administrators need access to production systems?

How much authority do your developers and administrators need on your production systems? Does each programmer need *ALLOBJ authority? Have you ever failed a security audit because of too many user profiles with too much special authority? When end users call your Help Desk for help with authority problems, does the Help Desk ask for the end user's password and then sign on to test the authority issue?

How do you coordinate resource needs with business processes across partitions?

By Tom Huntington

IBM LPAR technology is so popular today that most IBM System i users have adopted it. But this technology also creates issues, such as how to integrate your business processing with the movement of your LPAR resources.

The Hardware Management Console (HMC) is an LPAR tool that lets you move resources manually or schedule their movement based on time and date. However, when you move LPAR resources manually to share tape drives or memory, mistakes that cause major problems can happen. The question is how to automate resource movement. Can you use your System i to move a hardware resource, such as a tape drive, automatically when a backup job finishes? Can you automate processor movement as part of end‑of‑month business procedures?