midrange.com - In My Humble Opinion

For those of you involved in System i oriented Local User Groups (LUGs), midrange.com offers some free services that you might like to take advantage of ...

Mailing lists

You can request two types of mailing lists ...

1. A simple announcement list to broadcast meeting information & other important bits to your membership. This type of list is being used with great success by The Omni User and the Washington Area Midrange users group (WAM). These lists are usually named '<lug name>-announce@midrange.com'.
2. Private discussion mailing lists for small organizing groups in your LUG ... your BOD, annual tech conference organizing committee, etc. These lists are usually named '<lug name>-<committee name>-discuss@midrange.com'.

To utilize this service, contact me and I can get it setup. Once the list(s) is setup, I'll provide you with a URL for the list administrative interface and a password. You then import your membership email roster into the list and you're ready to go.

As with all midrange.com hosted mailing lists, no subscriber lists will ever be sold or distributed to a third party for any reason.

I can host up to two lists for each LUG for free. If you need more than two lists, let me know and we can discuss it.

Banner Ads

The banner ad serving offer falls into two categories ...

1. Regular meetings ... targeted at your specific geographic region.
2. Special events ... annual tech conferences, once a year events, etc. Targeted at entire US.

For the regular meeting banner ad's, you just need to provide me with 468x60 banner ad that advertises your user group, a target url, and the geographic region you cover.

For the special events, you can provide me with one or two banner ad's (one 468x60 and one 300x250) that advertise the event, the target URL, and the effective dates. I will set the banner up to run for the entire US. An example can be found at http://omniuser.org/images/omni07bannerWide1.gif and http://omniuser.org/images/omni07bannerSquare.gif (these were both run for the OmniUser 2007 technical conference).

If you would like to utilize either of these services for your LUG, feel free to contact me at 'support@midrange.com'.

Similar to the old saying "Physician, heal thyself" ... I certianly should live by those words.

Today I was chasing down a problem on one of our systems at work ... a program that works fine on V5R2 wasn't working on V5R3.

I was 99% sure the problem was in an i5/os server program ... and even found a APAR that described the problem almost to the tee.  Unfortunately, the PTF identified in the APAR didn't help.

So I called IBM and opened a PMR ... I got transfered to Colleen in the languages group, who looked at the job log and source fragment I sent, and sent me a reply indicating that the following link might be useful: http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l/200505/msg00900.html.

DOH!  Maybe I should have done a bit more research myself before opening up the PMR.

I made the adjustments identified in the MIDRANGE-L posting and, lo and behold, the program worked perfect.