• Get Your PHP on IBM i, Hold the Zend

  December 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  PHP was one of the first open source technologies to make an impact on the IBM i server. But due to the arrangement that IBM made with Zend, the PHP technology has been tied to a specific software distribution controlled by Zend. But now, IBM i shops that want to use PHP but don’t want to pay for the Zend Server distribution after the first free year of support is up now have a free option available – and it’s from the Zend folks themselves, no less.

  On December 2, the folks at Zend posted a repository for Community PHP …

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• Syncsort’s Pitney Bowes Deal: All About Good, Clean Data

  December 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort completed its $700 million acquisition of Pitney Bowes’ software and data business last week, just in time to get a piece of the end-of-year IT spending extravaganza. As Syncsort CEO Josh Rogers sees it, the deal will bring a host of benefits to existing Syncsort customers, particularly as it relates to feeding next-gen analytics systems with good, clean data.

  The Pitney Bowes deal brings Syncsort new solutions that it can sell to business intelligence and data analytics organizations, including data quality, data cleansing, data matching, and data discovery tools. It also brings master data management (MDM) capabilities to Syncsort, …

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• Three IBM i Vendors Who Are Still Announcing Things in 2019

  December 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It’s that time of year when the holidays beckon and work starts to slow. We notice that here at IT Jungle, as the fruitcake deliveries heat up and the pace of news comes to a grinding halt. Here are three IBM i software vendors that aren’t letting the calendar get in the way of making announcements.

  The fun starts out with Raz-Lee Security, the Nanuet, New York, company, which unveiled a pair of new IBM i security software bundles last week. What’s more, it is also offering discount pricing for those who act fast.

  The first bundle, the …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, December 11

  December 11, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  All good things must come to an end, and so it is with 2019. This is the last installment of Monitor for the year and we hope we have brought you lots of helpful information and interesting news from the computing community. At least, that is always the goal. We look forward to doing more of the same in 2020. Best wishes to each and every one of you for a happy holiday season. Before you go, check out the latest happenings below, and we look forward to seeing you all again in the New Year.

  Top Stories From Outside

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 49

  December 11, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  After last week’s database action with IBM i 7.3, you could use a breather. And there is not a lot going on this week, thankfully. First, there is a new Redbook called “IBM Db2 Mirror for i Getting Started,” which you can check out at this link.

  There are new Temporary Storage fixes for IBM i 7.4, 7.3, and 7.2 – get ‘em while they’re hot! There is also a new version of IBM i Access Client Solutions V1.1.8.3, and new HIPER groups for IBM i 7.4, 7.3, and 7.2.

  There are no new or updated links in the …

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• Moving Off Big Iron? Be Very Careful, Gartner Says

  December 9, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i and mainframe professionals who have grown weary of defending their systems against people who want to replace them with more “modern” X86 and cloud platforms found an unlikely ally in the form of Gartner, which earlier this year published a report that cautioned against making rash, emotionally charged technological decisions when it comes to big iron migrations.

  “Replacing existing systems because people perceive them to be old can be a costly mistake,” Gartner senior analyst Thomas Klinect and vice president Mike Chuba wrote in a March piece titled Considering Leaving Legacy IBM Platforms? Beware, as Cost Savings May …

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• Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

  December 9, 2019 Greg Patterson and Mike Pavlak

  (Sponsored Content) The most difficult, thorny, and intractable problems can sometimes be effectively addressed, if not outright fixed, by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be addressed tactically while also hewing to a broader and deeper strategic plan.

  That, in a nutshell, is the issue facing most IBM i shops that have not done much application modernization above and beyond pushing the display part of the code to a 5250 green screen emulator or maybe doing a little screen scraping to gussy it up a little bit. The reality is there are still an awful lot …

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• Guru: More End Of Year Feedback

  December 9, 2019 Ted Holt

  You are busy. The people you serve need you to do more than one human being can do. You don’t have time to look for comments or updates to the articles we run in this august publication or any other. For this reason, I was pleased to publish some of your feedback in last week’s issue. This week I am pleased to share a bit more.

  In response to Guru: MERGE, Chicken, and Eggs, John asked a good question and made a good point:

  How is using this merge technique under commitment control any different than just doing the …

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• As I See It: When Gates Was Young

  December 9, 2019 Victor Rozek

  You would have to be of a certain age to remember how excited and optimistic users once were about computer technology. It all seems Paleolithic by today’s standards, but those heavy boxes and bulky monitors were wondrous tools and novel toys in their day. Technology transformed us into Harry Potter and a personal computer became our magic stick.

  My first computer was a PS/2. No, not a PlayStation, an IBM Personal System/2 that boasted a whopping 2 MB of RAM and 20 MB of disk storage – who could ever need anything more? It also contained a VGA graphic cards. …

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• Servers Cool A Bit In Q3, But The Market Is Still Hot

  December 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  All temperatures are relative. While the appetite for servers cooled a bit in the third quarter, according to the latest statistics from IDC, the decline is relatively modest and the period ended up still being one of the largest in history, thanks in large part to the appetite of hyperscalers and cloud builders for zillions of X86 servers.

  The declines were much more intense for midrange and big iron systems, which is typical given the product cycles from IBM. The Power9 chip is about halfway through its product cycle, and the System z15 mainframe was only announced a few weeks …

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• Join Us For The IBM i On The Public Cloud Webinar

  December 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After so many years of waiting, it looks like IBM i shops are going to have a wide variety of options when it comes to acquiring true cloud computing to either replace or augment their on premises systems.

  IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Skytap all are offing slices of Power9 machines, which complement the cloudy and hosted infrastructure that has been available for a number of years from Connectria, iInTheCloud, UCG Technologies, LightEdge Solutions, Data Storage Corp, Source Data Products, Secure Information and Services, and First Option IT have offerings that fall on the spectrum from traditional hosting to cloud as …

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• Nagios Solidifies Role in IBM i Monitoring

  December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for monitoring solutions would do well to add Nagios to their short list. The open source software has been embraced by IBM i shops, and thanks to a new SQL connector added by IBM with the latest technology refreshes and plans for monitoring the HMC, Nagios connectivity to IBM i is on the upswing.

  Nagios Core is a free, open source software project that’s been adopted by thousands of customers around the world to monitor servers, storage, software, services, networking gear, and anything else that can be connected to the network. The software is …

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• HelpSystems Bolsters Data Loss Prevention with Clearswift Buy

  December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems completed the first acquisition of the Kate Bolseth era this week with the purchase of Clearswift, a UK-based provider of data loss prevention (DLP) solutions. The software will play nicely with HelpSystems’ existing managed file transfer (MFT) offerings for IBM i and other platforms, according to new CEO Bolseth, who indicates that more and bigger acquisitions are on the horizon.

  Clearswift develops what it calls adaptive DLP, or A-DLP, technology that can automatically stop sensitive data from leaving the digital bounds of a company. When installed on a network gateway, the software will analyze the content of the documents …

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• Samba Patch Caps Busy Year for IBM i Security

  December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week patched a moderately severe security flaw in IBM i’s Samba implementation that could enable hackers to access data they really shouldn’t be able to access. The disclosure caps a rather busy second half of the year for security patches on IBM i that saw 26 emergency PTFs and Yum updates for Node.js, Python, the Apache HTTP Server, OpenSSL, ISC Bind, IBM Navigator, and even Db2 Mirror for IBM i.

  On November 26, IBM issued this security bulletin to let people know about the new flaw in the Samba client. The flaw could allow a hacker to not …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, December 4

  December 4, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  The year may be winding down, but before you log off for the holidays, there is plenty of action happening around the IBM i community. This week, IT Jungle’s own Timothy Prickett Morgan will be participating in a webinar to talk about all things cloud as they relate to the IBM i platform. You can find out how to listen in below in our Redbooks, White Papers, Blogs, and Other Resources section below. Then next week, Pete Massiello is hosting a webinar to take a look back at the IBM i in 2019. There’s more information on that event in …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 48

  December 4, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  This is important: If you are running IBM i 7.3, the Db2 for IBM i Group SF99703, Level 16, dated November 13 is defective. Do not install this group. Instead, install Level 17, which was made available on November 25. If you are not able to do that, contact IBM for assistance. Our understanding is that critical PTFs were not included in Level 16 update for the Db2 group, and the resulting issue is that both the A and B side will lock up and require a SLIP install to repair. You want to avoid that.

  Also, there is updated …

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• Db2 For IBM i 7.3 Hits A Bad Patch

  December 2, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you know, we are among the people in the IBM i community who are always telling you to keep current on your PTF patches for the best operating system available on Power Systems. (No, we are not talking about AIX or Linux.) But every now and again, as happens with all operating systems, something gets fixed and the fix is worse than the problem it was solving.

  That has apparently happened with the database patches for the Db2 for i relational database management system embedded in the IBM i 7.3 release once the Db2 Group patches from November 13 …

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• Converge Technology Emerges As Reseller Powerhouse

  December 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Here’s a computer company you may not have heard about: Converge Technology Solutions. Over the past two years, the publicly traded Toronto, Canada-based company has completed numerous acquisitions of value added resellers (VARs) and private cloud providers that ply the IBM Power Systems waters – including Key Information Systems, Corus360, and Essex Technology Group, to name a few – and there’s no reason to think it will stop in 2020.

  Converge Technology Solutions was founded in 2017, when it began executing its goal to acquire a number of smaller VARs and consolidate the “fragmented” reseller landscape, according to chief executive …

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• Guru: End Of Year Feedback

  December 2, 2019 Ted Holt

  The year has flown by. Before we know it, it will be 2020. The century is flying by, too. We’ve almost consumed a fifth of it. That seems like a good excuse to see what we might glean from some of your feedback. It’s been a while. More to come next week!

  Several readers wrote regarding the need to remove hard-coded values from programs. Jim brought up the problem of compile-time tables and arrays.

  I find cases where data is hard coded (state names, product categories are a few examples) for tables or arrays in dozens of programs.

  I wish …

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• Power S812 Gets Another Reprieve, And Other Power Systems Stuff

  December 2, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For whatever reason, Big Blue did not create a cut-down version of the Power9 entry server aimed at the smallest of the small businesses that run themselves on the IBM i platform. Meaning there was no Power S912 or Power S912 Mini replacement for the Power S812 and its specially priced Power S812 Mini. (The former is based on the Power9 chip, while the latter is based on the older Power8 chip, which has a lot less oomph per core.)

  Back in March, IBM extended the life of the Power S812 and its Mini variant until November 29 of this …

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