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Rob McNelly

Contributor

Rob McNelly is a Senior AIX Solutions Architect doing pre-sales and post-sales support for IBM Premier Business Partner Meridian IT Inc. in Deerfield, Ill. He is a technical editor and a former administrator within IBM's Integrated Technology Delivery and Server Operations division. Rob was named an IBM Power Systems Champion (www.ibm.com/developerworks/champion) in October 2011. Rob can be reached at rob.mcnelly@gmail.com.

A note from Rob:

“I enjoy camping, hiking, biking and backpacking through the mountains of Arizona. I’ve also learned to enjoy Ragnar races, and sprint triathlons. I always look forward to spending time on Arizona’s closest beach which is located in Puerto Penasco, Mexico. I enjoy scuba diving from live-aboard diving boats. My favorite trip was hiking to the blue waters of Havasupai, and I’m planning on hiking the Grand Canyon in the near future. Long ago, I realized that I would rather live in a hot, dry climate than shovel snow.”

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Articles

A Warning About Running ezh and eezh Scripts in Updated HMC Environments

Rob McNelly

October 31, 2023

In 2020 I wrote about a couple of scripts called ezh and eezh: “EZH is a script for the [HMC] to provide an alternate, easier to use, command line interface for many common commands, and the goal of the project is to make the HMC command line interface easier to use for day to day […]

Articles

IBM Support Insights: Infrastructure Management Simplified

Rob McNelly

September 7, 2023

Like many of you, my organization manages servers, switches, storage devices, etc., in multiple data centers located throughout and even outside of the country. With collections of devices this large, naturally, there are many challenges. How do you manage hardware inventories? How do you know when a new device is added to your environment? How […]

Articles

The Subtle but Significant Differences Posed by Power10 Hardware and the New HMC

Rob McNelly

August 24, 2023

In March, Jaqui Lynch wrote about connecting HMCs to Power10 servers. If you’re in the process of moving to Power10/updating your HMCs, this is a must-read. If you’d like me to summarize it, I can do so in a pithy phrase: The only constant is change. The modern HMC has different connectivity methods compared to […]

Articles

When the Latest and Greatest Isn’t That Great

Rob McNelly

August 15, 2023

I recently went on a wild ride while with family. Thanks to a last-minute cancellation, my sister and niece needed to get from Rochester, New York, to Newark, New Jersey, to catch their connecting flight home to Phoenix. That flight, from Newark was scheduled to leave around 8 p.m. We were notified of the cancellation […]

Articles

Google’s Bard Spins Some Tales About IBM Power Systems and AIX

Rob McNelly

June 22, 2023

I assume none of you live under a rock, so you’ve most likely heard about people’s experiences toying around with ChatGPT and other AI solutions. I decided to get in on the fun, so recently I put Google’s bot—it’s called Bard—through its paces. I wanted to see what Bard knows about IBM Power Systems and […]

Articles

If You’re Not Using Inventory Scout, You’re Missing Out

Rob McNelly

May 17, 2023

Rob McNelly with the latest on invscout, along with tips, resources and an opportunity to give feedback to IBM

Articles

Ansible Webinar, HMC Tips and Changes to IBM’s Call Home

Rob McNelly

April 27, 2023

One advantage of being an IBM Champion is the communication we get from IBM. I’m subscribed to various newsletters that provide useful information. For instance, I was recently notified about a webinar about Ansible. This is from the email: “Join us to learn how Ansible offers significant benefits by providing fast and repeatable installations and […]

Articles

Hanging Out (Virtually) with IBM Champions, Upgrading an Older HMC and More

Rob McNelly

March 23, 2023

In January IBM announced its latest class of IBM Champions. As is noted in that blog entry, “This year’s 839 IBM Champions come from 60 countries; 68% of them have been IBM Champions before and are returning to the program, including our 30 Lifetime IBM Champions.” That I am one of those 30 Lifetime Champions […]

Articles

Networking, Hanging NIM Operations and AIX Quirks

Rob McNelly

February 16, 2023

I enjoyed this perspective on the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) from IBM Champion Andrey Klyachkin: “You know this eternal problem, don’t you? Datacenter guys laid the cable from an AIX server to some port on some network switch. Of course, everything was written on some sheet of paper many years ago. But years went after […]

Articles

Problem-Solving via the Internet, the Importance of Patching and More

Rob McNelly

January 20, 2023

Recently, I helped mount a filesystem on a Windows system that was being exported from an AIX system. The client wasn’t sure it would work—and there were challenges—but fortunately I found some guidance by googling. Following these instructions, I was able to export a test filesystem from an AIX machine in my lab. Then I […]