System Admin Simplified

The following procedure shows how to connect to an IBM i (AS400) server and explore it using the Visual Studio Code Integrated Development Environment. ========== 1. INSTALLATION 1.1. Download and install the Visual Studio Code IDE. https://code.visualstudio.com/ 2. PREPARATION 2.1. On the VS Code menu, go to [ Go -> Go to File... ] or press Ctrl+P, and input the command below to install the "Code for IBM i" extension. ext install HalcyonTechLtd.code-for-ibmi 2.2. On the left sidebar, click on the IBM i icon to show the IBM i Servers panel and click on the plus "+" sign at the top to create a connection. 2.3. On the Login tab, input the following IBM i server details and click [ Connect ]. Connection Name: (just a placeholder name for easy identification) Host or IP Address: (network address of IBM i server)   SSH Port: 22 (usually) Username: (username on IBM i server) Password: (password on IBM i server) 3. UTILIZATION 3.1. User Library List Libraries are requir...

cURL is a command-line tool that connects to a uniform resource locator (URL) for data transfer. Although this tool is commonly used to quickly check if websites are up and running, it can also be used to time the response of services. This may help administrators gather data for analysis to match against baseline response times for performance tuning. cURL has many options or flags available to adjust its behavior. For the purpose of timing, the following flags shall be utilized. [ -k ] tells cURL to disable peer verification of the SSL/TLS certificate. This is useful for connecting to URLs that have  self-signed certificates . [ -s ] tells cURL to operate in silent mode. This suppresses standard error messages and the progress meter. [ -o /dev/null ] tells cURL to dump its standard output to the null device. All messages are effectively discarded and no output file is produced. [ -w '%{time_total}\n' ] tells cURL to write the declared variables to standard output after all tr...