But Wait, There's More

Secunia Reports Potential OS/400 POP3 Vulnerability

Danish security monitoring expert Secunia has received a report that there is a potential security vulnerability in the POP3 email server at the heart of OS/400 V4R5 and higher. According to the report, which was sent in by Shalom Carmel, the author of a book called "Hacking iSeries," the authentication error messages in the OS/400 POP3 server provide clues that may assist hackers trying to crack into an OS/400 server. Specifically, rather than simply saying a message that says authentication invalid, OS/400 is sending out various messages that can help persistent hackers get in. According to Carmel, OS/400 returns messages can indicate a user name is good but the password is invalid, or good user name but the user profile is disabled, or good user name but the password is expired, and good user but no password is associated with the user. By giving such hints, Carmel contends hackers can have an easier time isolating a valid user name and then try cracking it with random passwords.

You can read the full Secunia report at http://secunia.com/
advisories/14964/. We will try to track down IBM's security experts and see how serious this really is and what IBM might do about it.

Puppy 510 Power5 Server Can't Run OS/400

A few weeks ago, in a story called "More on IBM's eServer i5 Plans for 2005 and 2006," I said (half in jest, but half to make a point about the "Squadron" Power5-based server line), that if you really wanted for some reason to buy skinny, 1U rack-mounted i5 servers and run i5/OS on the chassis that IBM sells as the eServer p5 510 and the OpenPower 710, Big Blue certainly could allow i5/OS to be run on these boxes.

This, I have been told by the i5 engineers in Rochester was a piece of speculation on my part that turns out to be not true. Unlike the Power5 520, 550, 570, and 595 boxes, which have both i5 and p5 I/O subsystems, the 510 box does not have the electronics to support the i5's unique I/O architecture.

IBM also took issue with my statement that the move from the Power5 to the Power5+ chips later this year, which involves a move to a smaller 90 nanometer chip making process, will improve the yield on chips, cut the cost of manufacturing, and give IBM a chance to pass on some lower chip costs to consumers. I said it is safe to assume IBM would pass some savings on to iSeries and pSeries customers; my IBM sources say that is not necessarily a safe bet, given all of the uncertainties and the fact that the Power5+ chips will have new features and will be implemented in a new process. I countered IBM by saying that, in general, the move to new processes can over the long haul significantly reduce the cost of making chips--that is one reason why chip making has progressed--but the difference between can and will and now and over the long haul can be a pretty big gaps. We'll see what IBM does when it does it.

My thanks to IBM for clearing those two points up.

IBM Tweaks SQL Features in i5/OS and DB2/400

As part of the April 12 announcements, IBM rolled out some widely anticipated tweaks to the SQL functions inside i5/OS and its integrated database, DB2/400.

The SQL Query Engine (SQE) inside the database has been given significant performance improvements and a new statistics engine. The tweaks to SQL also include features called materialized query tables (MQTs) and support for "Instead Of" triggers. MQTs allow for SQL queries to be precomputed and their results to be stored such that you an access to the results of those queries as you run queries in the future. MQTs have been supported in IBM's other DB2 database variants for some time. The Instead Of triggers allow application developers to create views into the database that are based on single or multiple tables; to get such a view might require complex logic and the slicing and joining of various tables.

Within the next few weeks, the techies who put together our Four Hundred Guru newsletter will get the low-down on these new SQL features and will show you how to use them.

Middleware Market Up Modestly in 2004, Says Gartner

According to research performed by Gartner, the application integration and middleware (AIM) software market accounted for $6.7 billion in sales of products worldwide in 2004, an increase of 5.8 percent over sales levels in 2003. IBM continues to dominate this space, with a 37.2 percent share of the market. And IBM's main rival for mindshare in the application server space--BEA Systems continues to lose ground. As you can see from the table below, Oracle is growing faster than IBM but is starting out pretty small, and Microsoft is seeing explosive growth in the AIM space and looks set to pass Oracle and start vying with Fujitsu for the third pole position in the market. AIM includes application servers, portals, messaging middleware, and transaction processing monitors, by Gartner's definition.

Microsoft Clears Last-Minute Hurdle, Completes Groove Networks Acquisition

Despite a last-minute attempt to block it, Microsoft completed its acquisition of Groove Networks last week. Microsoft's acquisition of Groove Networks, which was announced last month, didn't sit well with some Groove Networks investors, including Michael Mathews, who filed a suit to block the acquisition, claiming it didn't serve the interests of smaller investors.

Last week, a Delaware Chancery Court refused to grant a temporary restraining order against the acquisition, which cleared the way for the acquisition to proceed. Microsoft said it will continue to sell Groove's Virtual Office software as it looks for ways to more deeply ingrate the collaboration software with other products, including Microsoft Office and the Windows SharePoint Service portal. Groove founder Ray Ozzie, who invented the Lotus Notes software now owned by Microsoft rival IBM, takes the job of co-chief technology officer at Microsoft. Ozzie will work directly with Microsoft chief software architect Bill Gates and fellow Microsoft CTOs Craig Mundie and David Vaskevitch to help shape corporate-wide communication and collaboration offerings. Ozzie will continue to work from Groove's headquarters in Beverly, Massachusetts, which is 3,070 miles from Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters, but that distance shouldn't hinder productivity, considering the software being developed here.

Analyst Firm Says Mid-Sized Firms Not Interested in Linux

Info-Tech Research Group, a market researcher based in London, Ontario, has just released a report called "IT Priorities 2005," and that report says that mid-sized businesses are not really interested in Linux and overwhelmingly prefer the Microsoft Windows platform.

Info-Tech surveyed 1,400 midrange shops in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, to get their viewpoints on a wide range of issues, and released a trickle of its findings to try to drum up sales for the report.

About 27 percent of the midrange shops that Info-Tech talked to said they had Linux installed, which doesn't strike me as a lack of interest at all. However, 48 percent of the respondents said they have no interest in Linux whatsoever, and another 15 percent were not sure. Info-Tech said of the remaining 10 percent surveyed who said that they will evaluate Linux over the next three years, only a portion of these companies will actually deploy Linux after evaluating it.

"Microsoft still dominates this market and is the clear leader for mid-sized companies," said Frank Koelsch, executive vice president of Info-Tech in a statement accompanying the results. "Linux was initially hot, but interest has substantially declined. Companies are past the hype and taking a much more cautious approach toward Linux. For smaller organizations that already have a trained Windows-based support staff, adding Linux to the mix can add headcount, complexity, and create havoc. Unless there is a compelling business reason to implement a Linux system, IT decision makers in mid-sized enterprises should stick to Microsoft solutions, even though they are not perfect either."

If the people behind Unix had taken this attitude, we'd still be using dumb terminals from mainframes, and we wouldn't have the Internet. (Well, the Internet might be SNA with green-screens.) The fact of the matter is that the price disparity between Linux and Windows is nowhere near the order of magnitude that existed between mainframes and Unix servers 10 years ago--a magnitude that the AS/400 managed to hit as well until the late 1990s, when it started looking more costly than Unix boxes. People are installing Linux sometimes to save money, but more times than not for other reasons.

Azul Systems Taps IBM to Support Java Engines

Azul Systems, the maker of network-attached processing appliances that burst onto the scene last fall, has announced that it has tapped IBM Global Services to deliver service and tech support for its appliances. IBM is only being given the contract to support North America. Azul is expected to launch its appliances--if you can call an SMP server with up to 384 processors and 256 GB of main memory an appliance--on April 18. (See "Azul's Network-Attached Processing to Shake Up Server Market" for more details on the Azul concepts. It's a pretty cool box.) I will detail Azul's announcements in next week's issue.