Mon, 02/18/2019 - 12:21 By emziemer

In a 2018 article by technical writer and blogger Jim Porell entitled "Porting an Enterprise App to System z – my experience. Part 2 of 4: The Good," Sine Nomine Associates and Neale Ferguson were applauded for their help with information on Linux and System z. Ferguson, in particular, acted as a mentor for the author, pointing him to useful downloads and libraries.

In Part 2 of the article, Porell writes:

The LCDS virtual images came with RedHat kernel as the base, with some optional software included, but that was all. I need several dozen pieces of open source software to add to my environment to build my S390X binaries. Again, I don’t want to spend the money to buy a supported Linux distro for this Proof of Concept. I’m directed to Sine Nomine Associates, and in particular to Neale Ferguson. He could not have been a better ally in this effort. First and foremost, he pointed to libraries on their servers where I could retrieve many of the binaries that were necessary. It was such a relief to find many of the rpm’s I needed on their website. As mentioned earlier, I was a newbie to this kind of porting. He spent considerable time mentoring me on both basic Linux and System z specifics to keep me moving along. As important, Neale was on the Docker band wagon. He’d begun building docker containers with specific functionality. I was able to take several of his containers and imbed them into the containers I was building to simplify my deployment.

A retired engineer for IBM, Porell considers himself "a technical evangelist for the IBM mainframe, as well as someone that enjoys seeing new business ideas and solutions grow." He now writes for James Porell Consulting.