• County Battles IBM i Server’s Legacy Image – And It’s a Problem

  September 19, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Like many municipalities, Grand Traverse County in Michigan relies on an IBM i server to run day-to-day operations. And like many municipalities, it’s encountering a number of challenges as it seeks to modernize core applications, including usability and security concerns. But it’s also battling widely held perceptions that the IBM i platform is old and washed up.

  “We live in the computer age, but many of us live in a county that’s more Atari than PlayStation 4,” starts the September 8 editorial in the Traverse City Record-Eagle, a local newspaper that has documented the county’s IT challenges over the …

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• Serious Security Vulns Patched In IBM i

  September 19, 2018 Alex Woodie

  No good deed goes unpunished. Such as it is with cybersecurity, which demands unceasing attention paid to a never-ending stream of flaws and patches as the cost of remaining off the front page. To that end, IBM patched several more security flaws in IBM i last week, including two serious flaws in Node.js, five critical vulnerabilities in Samba, and one moderate flaw in OpenSSH.

  It’s easy to get lulled into a false state of security on the IBM i server, thanks to its unique architecture, cryptic file names, and reputation for strong security. It’s hard enough to find programmers, administrators, …

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• New Option for 24/7 IBM i Monitoring

  September 19, 2018 Alex Woodie

  It’s important to keep one’s eyes on IBM i server metrics in order to nip problems in the bud. But hiring a night-shift operator can be expensive, and moving your applications to a private cloud might not be feasible. A third option was presented last week by Data Storage Corporation in the form of IBM Power Monitor 24, a new service that promises to provide continuous 24/7 monitoring of client’s IBM i servers.

  Like all cloud service providers, Data Storage Corporation invests in systems monitoring and management. After all, if you’re running critical IBM i servers on behalf of clients, …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, September 19

  September 19, 2018 Jenny Thomas

  One can never have too many champions, and the IBM i is no exception. IBM is once again looking for champions and there is no reason someone from our ecosystem isn’t deserving of the prize. If you know an “innovative thought leader in the technical community,” use the link below to nominate that person. One such person, who we cannot nominate because he is an IBM employee, is participating in a webinar today to discuss current state of the IBM i. You can find the link at the top of the calendar section below.

  Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 37

  September 19, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  The Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities are the gift that keeps on giving in terms of security worries and hurried patches, and this week in the IBM i PTF Guide is yet another demonstration of this fact.

  See this link for full details on the new fixes, and check the tab in the Guide for SpectreMeltdown, which is new new.

  There are new fixes for PEX and Job Watcher on V7R3, check here for details.

  The Tech Refreshes are out, finally, for V7R3 and V7R2. Check the TR tab in the Guide for further information.

  Links this week: …

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• Adventures In IBM i Encryption

  September 17, 2018 Tom Woolaway

  Are you impacted by the New York Cybersecurity Requirements for Financial Services Companies? If you are a banking, insurance, or brokerage firm that uses a license to operate in New York, these regulations require specific cybersecurity practices be implemented. Section 500.15 Encryption of Nonpublic Information requires encryption at rest of non-public information. Or perhaps you have other reasons to want to encrypt your IBM i drives.

  This article focuses on encryption at rest of the disk drives of IBM i systems using 57XX-SS1 Option 45 – Encrypted ASP Enablement, where you end up with an unencrypted system ASP 1 and …

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• IBM Tweaks Power Iron, Pulls Software, Adds Proactive Support

  September 17, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue announced the “ZZ“ Power9 entry systems back in February, the “Boston” entry machines in May, and the midrange “Zeppelin” and high-end “Fleetwood” machines in August, which is the full product line. But IBM is still nipping and tucking the product line as customers react to it and want slightly different things than what initially came out with the systems.

  In announcement letter 118-079, IBM made a few tweaks that will be interesting to IBM i shops. First of all, the mainstream Power S924 system, a 4U rack or tower system with two Power9 processors, …

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• Guru: Phonetic Functions In SQL, Part 1

  September 17, 2018 Paul Tuohy

  In my next two articles I am going to discuss the use of phonetic functions in SQL. You can use phonetic functions to select or order rows based on the phonetic sound of a string as opposed to the actual characters in the string. The obvious use of phonetic functions is with names, but they can be used with any string columns.

  I must admit that this touches on one of my pet peeves — the spelling of my surname. I have lost count of the number of times I have had to spell my name two, three, or four …

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• As I See It: Estimable Hiring

  September 17, 2018 Victor Rozek

  One of the consequences of being wildly successful is that others are eager to imitate you. In a culture worshipful of winners and disdainful of losers, nothing, it seems, guarantees credibility quite as much as raging success. Whether expounding on mangos or mergers, the opinions of the successful always receive rapt attention. Their brains are picked, their writings analyzed, and every budding entrepreneur wants to harness the secrets of their success.

  So when Jeff Bezos, arguably the most successful man on the planet, says that hiring the right people is “the single most important element” in ensuring Amazon’s continued success, …

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• Where There Is A (Steve) Will, There’s An (IBM i) Way

  September 17, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Being the chief architect of the IBM i platform is at the same time a difficult and an easy job, and Steve Will, who has been at this job for more than a decade, has been tireless in not only guiding the platform through the massive technology changes that the IT industry is constantly undergoing, but also in communicating the message that this platform is not the AS/400 as we knew 30 years ago.

  People often complain that the IBM i platform does not have a chief marketing officer or even a marketing budget, but as far as I can …

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• Why Curbstone Picked iSam Blue for HA

  September 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to picking an IBM i high availability vendor, there are a lot of factors that come into play. Does the product do what I need it to do? Are the license and maintenance fees reasonable? Will the vendor give me the support I need? When the folks at Curbstone considered HA offerings for its IBM i-based credit card authorization portal, all signs pointed to iSam Blue.

  Founded in 2002, Curbstone has built a business around credit card authorization software, particularly on the IBM i platform. The company’s founder and CEO, Ira Chandler, wrote the first commercial credit …

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• Archive Migration A Success For County Clerk

  September 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  A county clerk’s office in Illinois that relies on IBM i-based applications to keep its records straight has successfully migrated its archive from an older Ultra-Density Optical (UDO) setup to a network attached storage (NAS)-based device that utilizes newer optical technology. Best of all, the new storage solution didn’t impact response times on the IBM i server one bit.

  The Madison County Circuit Clerk’s Office was up against a mandate to comply with a new State of Illinois law requiring documents in civil court proceedings to be stored electronically and to be available for real-time access. While its JANO Justice …

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• IBM Patches Security Flaws In IBM i

  September 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week shared details of two new OpenSSL vulnerabilities that are impacting all supported versions of IBM i. That came on the heels of two more vulnerabilities that were disclosed last month in IBM i’s Python implementation and the HTTP Server. All of the flaws have been patched by IBM.

  IBM i 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 are impacted by the pair of OpenSSL vulnerabilities disclosed by IBM on August 30. Neither of the flaws, which include CVE-2018-0732 and CVE-2018-0737, are particularly nasty, but they do open gaps in the platform’s security apparatus just the same, so it’s important to …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, September 12

  September 12, 2018 Jenny Thomas

  Some acts are hard to follow. Sometimes you don’t even want to try. I find myself in that position today as I attempt to step in to the shoes of really one of the very best people, not just in our little ecosystem, but in the world. If I had it my way, Dan Burger would be writing Monitor, like he has from the day we launched it, and I would be looking forward to our weekly exchange when he passed it on to me for a light edit before we shared it with the IBM i world. We lost …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Number 20, Volumes 34, 35, 36

  September 12, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  It’s been three weeks since our last PTF guide, but we have been keeping up with all the updates and have packaged it all together for you. In addition to the usual defective PTF rundowns each week, we have seen some OpenSSL fixes and new HIPER and Security groups. It is also interesting to note that as of September 8, it has been four months since a bug was found in a patch. We aren’t sure if this sets any sort of record, but it is definitely worth mentioning! All the latest PTFs are lined up below for you. Happy …

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• Weak Internal Security Causes Weak External Security

  September 10, 2018 Dan Burger

  Editor’s Note: Our dear friend and colleague, Dan Burger, passed away in August. We grieve. The last story that Dan worked on was about long-time security expert, Pat Botz, joining HelpSystems, the conglomerate that focuses on systems management, monitoring, security, high availability clustering, and performance management for the IBM i platform, along with a bunch of tools for complementary AIX and Linux platforms.

  Botz goes way back in the computer industry. He wrote the Basic compiler and CAD tools for Control Data supercomputers and then lead the development of CAD tools for its AIX workstation line three decades ago. He …

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• Zend Server 2018 Brings PHP 7.2 To IBM i

  September 10, 2018 Alan Seiden

  Since its release on IBM i in 2006, PHP, a popular open source language for building web sites, has become well established on this platform. Like IBM i, PHP has kept up with the times, improving with each release. PHP is installed via a product called Zend Server, which offers a basic, free license for IBM i users, as well as premium paid licenses.

  I wanted to learn more about the latest release, called Zend Server 2018 (pronounced twenty eighteen), so I interviewed Zeev Suraski, co-founder and chief technology officer of Zend, which is now part of Rogue Wave, …

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• Guru: Data-Centrism, Step Zero

  September 10, 2018 Ted Holt

  I hear a lot these days about the need for data-centric information systems. That is as it should be. The proper way to support an organization is to remove logic from application programs and put it into the database through such devices as constraints and triggers. However, before many shops can take the first step in that direction, they need to take what I call step zero.

  Step zero in data-centric computing is to remove hard-coded data values from programs and put them into the database. Just as the database manager should enforce business rules (e.g. we don’t ship to …

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• IBM Showcases New Crop of ‘Fresh Faces’

  September 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  For a computer platform to remain vital, it must have a constant stream of new arrivals. This is just as true for IBM i, which has struggled to retain relevance in an increasingly homogeneous IT world, as it is for every other platform. But give kudos to IBM and its latest batch of “fresh faces” that highlight the fact that millennials are finding their way to IBM i and Power.

  While nobody is claiming that younger folks are knocking down the door to get onto IBM i, there nevertheless appears to be a solid group of individuals from the less-than-40 …

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• The Server Boom Goes From Sonic To Nuclear

  September 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The smartphone, the second wave of Internet applications, the shift to cloud computing, and the normal expansion of processing and storage as companies hoard more and more data in the hopes of doing something useful with it have all combined to send the server market skyward.

  In the second quarter, worldwide sales of servers experienced an astonishing 43.7 percent growth rate, to $22.53 billion dollars, the largest quarter for server sales in the history of information technology – even if you adjust for inflation and probably even if you take out the effects of DRAM and flash memory price hikes …

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