The IT Jungle

Going Off IBM Hardware Maintenance A Risky Move

April 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

Organizations that are running older Power Systems servers have some tough decisions coming up. IBM ceased offering hardware support for Power 6 servers on March 31, and support for Power 7 will go away on September 30. Some organizations may choose to support themselves instead of upgrading to a newer machine, but that move comes with substantial risks.

While there’s no central clearinghouse for this sort of information, it would appear that a good percentage of IBM i customers – if not most of them – have hardware and software support agreements with IBM. Big Blue provides three years …
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IBM i Announcements Loom, and So Does POWERUp 2019

April 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

By now you probably know that IBM is making its next round of IBM i announcements next Tuesday, April 23, via a COMMON webcast. But what you might not know is that COMMON has more than a dozen sessions about the yet-to-be-disclosed announcements planned for the upcoming POWERUp 2019 conference taking place next month at Disneyland.

“Right now we’re looking at about 15 or 16 sessions about the announcement itself,” COMMON Executive Director Manzoor Siddiqui tells IT Jungle. “We’re going to be the first conference where people will have access to the knowledge and the content around that.”

On …
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Guru: Preamble Comments

April 15, 2019 Chris Ringer

Do you remember what you ate for lunch two days ago? If you’re like me, you had to think about it for a minute before answering. Now imagine trying to recall the detailed requirements of a few programs you wrote a year ago so you can modify them for a new project. Or better yet, what if someone else like a retired employee or a traveling contractor coded these programs? At this point you may become very dependent on any comments they left in the code.

It’s been said that any time spent commenting on your code now might save …
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Four Hundred Monitor, April 15

April 15, 2019 Jenny Thomas

If you are an IBM employee thinking of leaving your job, IBM probably knew about it before you did. Big Blue has been using AI as an employee retention tool and can predict with 95 percent accuracy which employees are likely to leave, CEO Ginni Rometty said in a recent interview. A little scary in the wrong hands, but if used effectively could mean a happier, more satisfied workforce, and cost savings in seeking and training new employees. You can see Rometty’s whole interview at the first link below, and then continue on to catch up on the rest of …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 15

April 15, 2019 Doug Bidwell

And the PTFs just keep on rolling. . . . This week, there are patches in the HTTP Server Group for IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3. There is also a new Database Group for IBM i 7.2.

And, as is common with most production operating systems these days, especially those that have a lot of components derived from open source software where things get discovered and patched out in the open where everyone can see and with a rapidity that operating systems of days gone by did not have to deal with, there is a continual stream of …
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Syncsort Debuts Unified IBM i Security Suite

April 10, 2019 Alex Woodie

Syncsort rolled out a suite of software this week that unifies several of the IBM i security products it has acquired over past two years. Dubbed Assure Security, the suite is designed to help IBM i shops lock down servers and protect them from threats while getting a handle on emerging data regulations, like the looming California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

The acquisition of Vision Solutions by Syncsort back in June 2017 closely coincided with the two companies’ joint pivot into data security. Vision, of course, was best known as a provider of IBM i high availability solutions when it …
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GoAnywhere Tops in MFT, Research Group Says

April 10, 2019 Alex Woodie

We haven’t heard a whole lot about the GoAnywhere managed file transfer (MFT) solution since HelpSystems acquired Linoma Software back in 2016. But the product is coming to life in a big way this year, thanks to a major refresh of the IBM i-supported product, as well as a top score in a reputable research group’s ranking of MFT products.

Info-Tech Research Group last week published a report ranking nine MFT products from some of the biggest names in file transfer and IT, including IBM, Ipswitch, Oracle, Adobe, and Citrix, among others. While GoAnywhere didn’t …
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Raz-Lee Reels In The File Editors

April 10, 2019 Alex Woodie

File editors can be great time-savers in certain situations. Who wouldn’t want developers to be able to quickly get into a database file, fix some errors, and then jump back out? Clearly, the answer is the security department. But thanks to a new solution from Raz-Lee Security called iSecurity Safe Update, file editors can be used without giving the security officer nightmares.

File editors are among the most popular products on the IBM i platform, thanks to their capability to developers and administrators to make changes to data quickly and easily, without requiring programming. The IBM i operating system comes …
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Four Hundred Monitor, April 10

April 10, 2019 Jenny Thomas

“You see golf. We see data.” I probably won’t be watching, but golf fans know the Masters kicks off this week in Georgia, and tech fans will be interested in seeing how IBM’s Watson keeps the tournament running smoothly. Of course, I wish I could tell you the IBM i was prominently featured, but it is always good to see IBM getting in front of 13 million television viewers, if the 2019 Masters lives up to last year’s numbers. You can see IBM’s slick website for the Masters at the first link below, and continue on from there for the …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 14

April 10, 2019 Doug Bidwell

We have some new items to report with this week’s PTF Guide. There are new HIPER and Security groups for all three supported releases. And there is a new MQ group for 7.3 and 7.2. Plus, there are new links for the System Passport Advantage and Passport Advantage Express. That’s a lot of new for you to chew on.

Sadly, there is nothing new to report for tips this week. That would have been too much to hope for, anyway. There are also no new defectives to review this week.

Here is the last defective PTF rundown for each release: …
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Yes, IBM i Shops Have AI Options, Too

April 8, 2019 Alex Woodie

Companies of all shapes and sizes are encouraged to adopt artificial intelligence these days. Most of today’s AI tech, however, was developed to run in open systems and X86 environments. But there are a growing number of AI options from IBM and its partners for customers that want to keep their data resident on the Power Systems platform.

There’s no denying there’s a lot of hype around AI today. One can scarcely turn on the TV or open a magazine or Web page without being inundated with claims of how leading organizations are using AI to gain a competitive edge, …
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RTPA Looking For A Few Good Software Reviewers

April 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Throughout the six decades of commercial computing, one thing has been universally true. Every good application development or system management tool, from the simplest debuggers all the way up to complex DevOps systems that can absorb multiple continuous streams of new code being mashed up against old code without making a mess of things, got its start because some programmer or administrator was so annoyed at how something worked – or more precisely didn’t work – that he or she created a new tool that did the job a whole lot better.

This is precisely the beginning story of Real-Time …
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Guru: Dealing With RPG Errors and Embedded SQL

April 8, 2019 Ted Holt

Hey, Ted! I’m having trouble using some of the new techniques I learned at the RPG and DB2 Summit. Below is a screen shot of a program I am writing. I cannot figure out why the compiler doesn’t like it. Can you see anything that would be causing the declarations to fail?

— Mike

I glanced over Mike’s code and noticed that he used a correlation name in the SELECT and WHERE clauses, but did not define that correlation name for any of the tables, like this:
```
SELECT x.onefield, x.twofield, x.redfield, x.bluefield
FROM MYTABLE
WHERE x.onefield = :TestValue;
```
He …
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As I See It: Why The Long Face?

April 8, 2019 Victor Rozek

For an increasing number of Americans, the elusive search for happiness starts and ends each day with screen time. Smartphones, symbolic of a larger attachment to, and dependence on technology, have become the fifth appendage, glued to their owners like fake fingernails. They amplify and simplify, offering seemingly endless relationships without the need for relating, and limitless connection without the bother of bonding.

To keep the voracious social media beast fed, most of us have become both content providers and consumers. Everyone, it seems, is flogging their own reality show. Each day we post our next episode and anxiously await …
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Let’s Try Converged Power Infrastructure One More Time

April 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Do you remember the Flex System modular servers launched seven years ago this month? These were the innovative machines that Big Blue sold off to Lenovo about two and a half years after they were launched and they were ramping? Do you remember the PurePower follow-ons to these that came out in May 2015? Or did we all just imagine that happened?

These modular machines, which were somewhere halfway between a rack server and a blade server, were put into preconfigured stacks and as the PureFlex system had cloud automation software to create a private cloud and then had …
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IBM Clarifies Java Options Following Oracle License Crackdown

April 3, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that are wondering how to maintain their Java environments following Oracle’s recent decision to restrict access to Java runtimes and development tools should pay close attention to some recommendations that IBM is making concerning Java, particularly how it impacts Access Client Solutions (ACS).

Oracle is slated to ship a critical security update for Java Standard Edition (SE) 8 in a week and a half. But unless you have bought a commercial license for Java SE 8, your business won’t be getting that update, which could leave your systems vulnerable. That’s because in late 2018, Oracle made some …
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IBM Patches New Security Flaws in Java, OpenSSL

April 3, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM this week patched a series of flaws in IBM i’s Java environment, including a pair of very serious problems in the OpenJ9 runtime that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code, in addition to a series of less-severe Java vulnerabilities. The company also fixed a new flaw found in IBM i’s OpenSSL implementation.

A total of seven Java flaws that impact IBM i versions 7.1 through 7.3 were addressed with one security bulletin issued by IBM on March 29. IBM issued Group PTFs for each release of the operating system to address them. A single OpenSSL flaw also …
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Attention Synon Users: You Can Automate Your Move To RPG Free Form And DevOps

April 3, 2019 Philippe Magne

(Sponsored Content) Depending on who you ask, there are about 1,000 IBM i shops that used the CA 2E (Synon) CASE tool to create their applications and are still using this tool to maintain those applications. This is not an easy task any more, and there is a much better way.

After three years in development and very stringent testing with five early adopter Synon shops, ARCAD Software is rolling out what it calls Modernization as a Service, or MaaS for short, which seeks to completely automate the move from Synon generated code to modern RPG Free Form, …
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Four Hundred Monitor, April 3

April 3, 2019 Jenny Thomas

It was nice to see some of our IBM i community getting into the April 1 spirit this week, even if it did make the job of finding news of the week tricky for me. I almost fell for Profound Logic’s “rebrand” into Profound Logistics, and I enjoyed seeing the iTech Solutions new superhero work uniforms. There was some real news this week as well, which we have gathered and summarized for you in true Four Hundred Monitor fashion. Read on to find out what’s up in the IT world, and don’t forget to check the calendar for upcoming webinars …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 13

April 3, 2019 Doug Bidwell

This week in the IBM i PTF Guide, we are obsessing about security. There is a security bulletin out that explains that there are multiple vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime that affect IBM i. There is consequently a new Java Group for all three releases – IBM i 7.1, IBM i 7.2, and IBM i 7.3. See this link for further details.

There is also a separate security bulletin, CVE-2018-14647, relating to Python that affects IBM i, and this affects all three currently supported releases as well. See this link for the scoop. For Python 2.7 …
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