• You’re Only As Old As The Applications You Feel

  June 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You didn’t actually think that we would have forgotten that Sunday, June 21^st, was the 32^nd birthday of the Application System/400, did you? Of course we didn’t forget.

  It was also Father’s Day and the first day of summer, and to be perfectly frank (Soltis), I got a new smoker from my wife and I spent the afternoon learning about the joys of hickory smoked barbeque ribs. It is a gift that just keeps giving, because I made about 40 pounds of meat in various kinds and flavors because I needed to try everything all at once. …

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• IBMiUnit Moves RPG Unit Testing Forward

  June 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

  As IBM i shops break up their monolithic programs into more reusable chunks, it’s reasonable to assume that they would adopt unit testing to make sure those chunks are working properly before promoting them into production. Unit testing hasn’t been widely adopted on the IBM i platform, which is why RPG developers who are looking for a unit testing tool may be interested in a new framework called IBMiUnit.

  IBMiUnit is an open source project that helps programmers test any RPG-based program, subprocedure, or method, including RPG-based SQL. The software, which is modeled off the popular JUnit and xUnit frameworks, …

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• An Investment In APIs For IBM i From Remain Software

  June 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Application programming interfaces (APIs) are not new. But API creation and consumption has surged in recent years as developers adopt more modular and extensible architectures for new and modernized applications. IBM i developers are getting into the act, too, which is leading vendors like Remain Software to cater to them with new tools, like its recently announced API Studio.

  A recent survey by API marketplace provider RapidAPI concluded that almost 67 percent of developers expect their API use to increase in 2020 compared to 2019. The company’s CEO, Iddo Gino, said the survey results confirm what the company has seen …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 24

  June 24, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  This will be our last Monitor until after the Fourth of July break, which marks the halfway point in the year for us, and this seems like a good time to look back at what 2020 has been for computing. Thanks to the global pandemic (which we are not happy about), we have seen entire workforces move to a remote format and conferences got virtual practically overnight. Sure there have been bumps in the road, but by and large, our ecosystem has been able to overcome and survive. It will be interesting to see how many people go back to …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 25

  June 24, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  We’ve got some movement this week on the PowerHA front – new PTFs are available! Get more information here.

  	
  7.2 PowerHA (for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3)	SI73520
  7.4 PowerHA				SI73521
  

  Also, don’t miss this fix: MF67243 – IPL-SRCB6005122-UNPRED SYSTEM HALT DURING IPL TO APPLY PTFS

  This isn’t a HIPER yet, but, sometimes you just have to put these on. Sometimes a fix lets you put on other fixes and this is one of those.

  Security Bulletin: OpenSSL for IBM i is affected by CVE-2020-1967

  5733-SC1	7.1 – SI73429
  		7.2, 7.3 & 7.4 – SI73430
  

  Security Bulletin: …

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• Security Gaining Attention On IBM i, But More Progress Needed

  June 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  First, the good news: IBM i shops are paying more attention to security and are making it a priority, according to the 2020 State of IBM i Security Study. But that isn’t necessarily translating into better security, as too much data remains vulnerable, the new report concludes.

  “A deeper understanding of the risks and the security controls built into the OS is currently driving a wave of interest in prioritizing cybersecurity issues on IBM i,” Robin Tatum, director of security technologies at HelpSystems, wrote in the 2020 State of IBM i Security Study, now in its 17th …

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• Abacus Cloud Customers Enjoy Wider Ecosystem

  June 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For many years, Abacus Solutions ran its private IBM i cloud business out of a commercial datacenter close to its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. A few years back, Abacus decided to move its clients’ machines to a new datacenter, and in addition to getting better disaster preparedness, the move opened up a whole new ecosystem of services for its IBM i customers.

  The move from Abacus’ old datacenters into new datacenters was completed in 2019, but only recently did Abacus Solutions announce it. To get the low down on the big move, IT Jungle recently caught up with Patrick Schutz, …

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• Guru: Use The Administration Runtime Expert To Validate Your System Configuration

  June 22, 2020 Dawn May

  Using the Administration Runtime Expert (ARE) to validate system configuration settings is an easy way to confirm configuration values are set the way you want them to be. You can use ARE to ensure these system configuration settings are consistent across multiple IBM i partitions or to verify settings have not changed on an individual partition. In this second in a series of articles on ARE, we’ll walk through the steps to set up a basic template to validate system configuration settings.

  The first step is to identify what system configuration attributes you want to make sure are consistent or …

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• As I See It: Searching For The Silver Lining

  June 22, 2020 Victor Rozek

  All clouds, it is said, have their silver linings. Hurricanes are the winds of profit for the building trades; obesity sustains a huge (no pun intended) diet industry; bad relationships sell boatloads of self-help books; and sheltering in place has been a godsend for delivery companies, not to mention cardboard manufacturers, and the sex toy industry.

  Even IT, one of the more bombproof sectors of the economy, is not wholly immune from the laws of cause and effect. Silicon Valley, arguably the most prestigious assembly of high-tech prowess on the planet, was not spared the consequences of COVID-19.

  MIT Technology …

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• The Ups And Downs Of The Server Cycle

  June 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you took a pause for your server upgrade plans in the first quarter as the coronavirus pandemic was starting to take root, you were not alone. But all things considered, the period ended in March was not as bad for server spending as you might have guessed, and we think that the second, third, and fourth quarters are the real test. The first quarter was just the warmup.

  Business has been pretty brisk for those who sell server components, and the ODMs and OEMs have been pretty busy, wrestling with their supply chains and trying to meet customer demand …

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• More Open Source Databases Coming To IBM i

  June 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM is in the process of bringing several new open source databases to the IBM i platform, including schema-less NoSQL databases as well traditional relational systems. Among the databases that Rochester is targeting are MongoDB, arguably the most popular NoSQL database and a favorite among Web and mobile developers, as well as PostgreSQL, one of the industry’s oldest and most widely used relational databases.

  Databases today almost are like programming languages, with developers mixing and matching databases to handle different functions, often within the same application. DB-Engines.com tracks more than 330 distinct databases, while there are somewhere around 700 programming …

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• Why You Need To Implement Exit Point Security – Now

  June 15, 2020 Rich Loeber

  (Sponsored Content) As everyone knows, the only truly secure computer is one that is not networked to any other system or any client, and that has no users doing anything at all on the system. And if you really want to be honest about it, you should probably turn its power off. Then, it would be perfectly secure – and perfectly useless as well.

  To make any system useful, it has to be opened up so it can be reached by the world, and it may be hard to remember this now, three decades after the client/server and …

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• Guru: SUBSET on EXECUTE and OPEN

  June 15, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  The DB2 for i Enhancements in IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 8 / IBM i 7.4 Technology Refresh 2 just made dynamic SQL, embedded in RPG, a lot easier to use. It includes an enhancement entitled USING SUBSET on EXECUTE and OPEN with Extended indicators. This enhancement provides a simple and effective solution to a problem that I first highlighted in an article I wrote back in September of 2015. (See A First Look At SQL Descriptors.)

  The “problem” we are dealing with is how to handle a variable number of host variables being used in a dynamic …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 15

  June 15, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  We survived another week, which in 2020 is probably something to celebrate. And it appears our industry is beginning to wake up as we are starting to see a little more news that isn’t directly related to COVID-19, although it will be some time before the pandemic is out of the conversation and its impact has forever changes the way we will do many things. Travel is still not on the radar for most, but it will be interesting to see what the summer brings. In the meantime, the online game is strong so be sure to check out what’s …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 24

  June 15, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Another week, and another security bulletin for vulnerabilities in open source software. This time, it is CVE-2020-1927 and CVE-2020-1934 in Apache HTTP Server that affect IBM i. You can read more about it at this link. The PTFs that fix it are:

  • Release 7.4: SI73415
  • Release 7.3: SI72840
  • Release 7.2: SI72748

  Here is the rundown by operating system release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • IBM MQ for IBM i – V7.1.0/V8.0.0/V9.0.0

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • IBM MQ for IBM i – V7.1.0/V8.0.0/V9.0.0

  PTF Groups 7.2

  • Nothing to see here.

  PTF Groups 7.1

  • Nothing to see

  … Read more

• IBM Wheels And Deals With Solution Edition Booster Pack

  June 8, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, we told you about the double memory and double I/O request for price quote (RPQ) special deals that IBM quietly rolled out in April without putting out any announcement letters and that are still in effect until June 30. So consider this a reminder that these deals are still out there and now is a good time to invest in new Power9 iron if you want to pay less for it than you otherwise might.

  But that is not all you can get. As it turns out, Big Blue is revamping its IBM i Solution Edition …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Top Five Reasons To Go Paperless With IBM i Forms

  June 8, 2020 Stephen Flaherty

  (Sponsored Content) As offices closed and employees began working from home earlier this year, a significant challenge arose for companies that rely on printed spool files and IBM i documents. If employees were not in the office with access to a printer, how would they get checks, invoices and other documents to the people who need them? IT departments were already scrambling to enable employees to work remotely, and suddenly they were faced with the urgent need to electronically distribute documents.

  A lot of organizations weren’t prepared to change the way they do business overnight and much of …

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• Guru: Graphical Debugging Through ACS

  June 8, 2020 Ted Holt

  ACS (IBM i Access Client Solutions) keeps getting better and better. I can’t stay up-to-date with the latest releases of all the software I use, but I do everything I can to keep up-to-date with ACS. One of the handiest of the relatively most recent releases is the ability to access IBM i Debugger through Run SQL Scripts. If you haven’t tried IBM i Debugger, you’re missing out.

  IBM i Debugger (a.k.a. System Debugger) is part of the IBM Toolkit for Java. It’s graphical, and it makes the green-screen debugger (STRDBG) look like something built by cavemen. To show you …

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• Unit Testing Gets A Boost With ARCAD

  June 8, 2020 Alex Woodie

  “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” The famous management consultant Peter Drucker said those words to relate his philosophy on achieving business success. He didn’t know it at the time, but they would also apply to software development, including the testing of software, which is an area that ARCAD Software knows a thing or two about.

  ARCAD Software has been a leader in IBM i testing for many years. It started with Verifier, the company’s flagship regression testing tool, which forms a part of its suite of DevOps tools for IBM i. Verifier helps developers ensure that …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 23

  June 8, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Some weeks are crazy when it comes to PTF patches with IBM i, and some weeks are relatively quiet. And thankfully, after a particularly crazy couple of months in the world, the patch load is pretty light this week.

  Here is the rundown by operating system release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • QMGtools
  • SAP Support Required PTF List

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • QMGtools
  • SAP Support Required PTF List

  PTF Groups 7.2:

  • QMGtools

  PTF Groups 7.1

  • SAP Support Required PTF List

  The new or updated links in the IBM i PTF Guide sheet this week are:

  • System: Software Servers Table

  This week’s tip …

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