• Raz-Lee Simulates Ransomware Attack on IBM i

  August 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  How would your IBM i server react to a ransomware attack? Would it successfully repel the invaders, or would it give the bad guys what they’re after: chaos and bitcoin? Simulating a ransomware attack is the gist of a new feature in Anti-Ransomware from Raz-Lee Security, which recently shipped a new release of the software.

  Raz-Lee Security debuted Anti-Ransomware back in 2018, a year after a pair of widespread ransomware attacks (WannaCry and Petya) made the computing world sit up and take notice of the new security threat blossoming on the Internet.

  Anti-Ransomware uses a rules-based approach to detect …

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• IBM Rolls Out ACS 1.1.8.5

  August 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week introduced a new release of Access Client Solutions (ACS), the popular IBM i client that’s used by administrators, programmers, and engineers alike. There are enhancements to Run SQL Scripts, new 5250 viewing options, and a performance boost for viewing selected files on the IFS with version 1.1.8.5, among other mostly minor updates.

  According to the release notes associated with the new iteration of ACS, IBM made a handful of changes with version 1.1.8.5.

  Let’s start with the improvements to Run SQL Scripts, which is an increasingly popular utility in ACS that leverages the power of SQL and …

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• Man-DB Brings Documentation to IBM i

  August 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who have a question about how a particular command or feature works in open source packages now have an easy way to look up documentations, thanks to the addition of support for the Man-DB utility in IBM i, which IBM unveiled in late July.

  Man-DB is an open source implementation of the standard Unix documentation system. It provides a mechanism for easily accessing the documentation that exists for open source packages, such as the Node.js language, or even for commands, like Curl.

  The software, which can be installed via YUM, only works with open source software on …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 12

  August 12, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  For many of us, the last 100 days are something we would like to forget. Days running together as we learn to manage work life and home life and all the new rules and social practices that come with a pandemic. Imagine doing that and taking on the leadership role for the biggest IT firm in the world. IBM’s new CEO Arvind Krishna came on board in April just as the coronavirus was taking hold around the world and there was no choice but to hit the ground running. This week, we examined Krishna’s first 100 days, which you can …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 32

  August 12, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  It is another busy week here in the summer of 2020, there is a lot of activity among our IBM i customers, and this is a blessing indeed. Better to be too busy than not busy enough.

  In the interest of time, we will get right to the point. This week there is a new release of Access Client Solutions: 1.1.8.5. There is also new release of SPT (System Planning Tool): V211.

  Here’s the PTF rundown by release:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • Temporary Storage PTFs

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • Temporary Storage PTFs

  PTF Groups 7.2:

  • Temporary Storage PTFs

  PTF Groups 7.1:

  • Nothing

  … Read more

• New IBM CEO’s First Hundred Days: A Mixed Bag

  August 10, 2020 Alex Woodie

  How did Arvind Krishna do during the first 100 days of his new job as the CEO of IBM? Krishna took the helm during a remarkable stretch in early April, when COVID-19 was clamping down on businesses of all sizes, so he will be forgiven for not completing the wholesale transformation of the 109-year-old company into the hybrid cloud leader during that time. Just the same, some people expected more from him.

  The selection of Krishna by IBM’s board of directors is important because he was the architect of the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition, which was announced in October …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Strategic Things to Consider With APIs and IBM i

  August 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  (Sponsored Content) The great thing about application programming interfaces is that many of the ways that programmers need to interact with system and application software are predefined and allow for consistent access to features and functions as well as data. To a certain extent, the APIs are what make such software useful. The API describes how the interface works, and libraries (in the sense of the software market at large, not the OS/400 and IBM i definition of that word) are developed to implement the functionality of the interface.

  The fun bit is that not only system software …

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• Guru: Use The Administration Runtime Expert To Validate Your Application Attributes

  August 10, 2020 Dawn May

  This third article in my series on using the Administration Runtime Expert (ARE) reviews how ARE can validate the attributes of your applications. This article assumes you have already learned the basics of how to use ARE from articles one and two.

  There are an unlimited number of ways you can use ARE to validate application attributes. A few examples are:

  • Verify application attributes on a single partition
  • Verify application attributes are consistent across multiple partitions
  • Verify application attributes in the test environment are the same as production
  • Verify application authorities

  When you are creating a template to validate …

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• As I See It: Adaptations

  August 10, 2020 Victor Rozek

  Back when it first became clear that COVID-19 was the real deal, my wife had scheduled a tentative appointment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. It was only for an initial interview and some lab work. The problem was, Rochester is located 1,700 miles from where we live, and flying in a giant aluminum cigar tube with who knows how many other people, some of whom were possibly infected, didn’t seem like such a swell idea.

  The solution seemed both simple and readily available: Computer technology. Conduct the interview over the internet, and have the tests done locally. It …

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• FlashSystem Gets Nearline Boost, Nutanix On Power Gets The Boot

  August 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a pretty quiet summer out there in the Big Blue sphere of influence, which includes Power Systems, IBM i, and a few hundred other products and services from IBM and its partners. But in the past several weeks, a bunch of things have happened that we thought you should be made aware of.

  On July 21, in announcement letter 120-021, IBM announced that it is now offering a 16 TB 7.2K RPM 12 Gb/sec nearline SAS disk drive option for its FlashSystem arrays. I know what you are thinking – what they heck is a disk drive …

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• POWERUp 2020 Pushed Online By Coronavirus Continuing Spread

  August 5, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Any hope that the spread of coronavirus would die down enough for COMMON to hold its POWERUp conference has been successfully smothered, as the user group last week was forced to cancel its annual meeting a second time in four months. If there’s any consolation to the COVID-19 chaos, it’s that online and virtual events are getting better and better – in the IT sector generally, as well as in our little neck of the i wood.

  There will be no cake served during the 60th anniversary celebration that COMMON had planned for its annual meeting, POWERUp 2020, which was …

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• HCL Certifies Domino 11 on IBM i/Power

  August 5, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Domino 11 officially shipped in late 2019 by HCL Technologies, the company selected by IBM to continue development of the Domino family of products in 2017. Last month, the company announced that Domino 11 running on IBM i has been certified on select Power9 servers. Among the new capabilities that it brings is the new low-code Volt environment.

  The Domino family of products, including Notes, Sametime, Connections, and Traveler, has been through quite a bit over the past few years. After nearly a decade of neglect by IBM, HCL Tech made the development of Domino 10 a priority for the …

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• HelpSystems Makes A Move In Data Classification

  August 5, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Before you can secure your data, you need to know what data you have and whether it’s sensitive. That’s the logic that drove the acquisitions of a pair of data classification software companies by HelpSystems recently.

  On June 25, HelpSystems’ announced the acquisitions of two firms — Titus and Boldon James — both of which offer similar capabilities in the field of data classification. HelpSystems plans to integrate their data classification offerings into products used by its large IBM i installed base.

  Titus, which is based in Ottawa, Canada, says it provides solutions to “some of the largest financial …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 5

  August 5, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  The beat goes on, as Sonny and Cher would harmonize, and while many might say that means time keeps marching forward, no matter what, time sure does seem to be moving awfully slow these days. Many aspects of our lives continue to be in a holding pattern as we wait out the pandemic, but in the IT world business continues and many of you haven’t missed a beat, although you have likely had to do a bit of pivoting. Our own Timothy Prickett Morgan found some reasons for optimism when he reviewed the latest Power Systems numbers, which is something …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 31

  August 5, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Forget the coronavirus pandemic, we have been crazy busy here at DLB Associates. So this week, of necessity, we will be short and sweet. Like Shirley Temple. Or barbeque ribs. Or real Italian espresso. Or memories from early childhood – well, some of the time.

  In PTF Land this week, there appears to be a new re-spin of the licensed internal code (LIC) for IBM 7.2, Q version to be precise. Here’s the PTF rundown by release:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • SAP Support Required PTF List for IBM i
  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • SAP Support

  … Read more

• Getting Out Of The Catch-22 Of Application Transformation

  August 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If starting up a business is hard, maintaining that business can be even more difficult. Conditions and tastes change over time, and applications that drive the business can feel the strain.

  Upper management and IT organizations might have the skills to keep business applications going and make modest changes here and there, or perhaps add a new product line or two. But they usually do not have the time or people to do anything too radical, such as modernizing and transforming those applications to work in completely new ways. This is where bringing in a product and services partner comes …

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• Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Comes To IBM i

  August 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue is now supporting IBM i with Ansible, the open source configuration management software developed by Red Hat. By including IBM i and AIX as a supported target in Ansible, companies that run IBM i will be able to remotely configure and manage IBM i and AIX servers using the same Ansible tools and techniques that they use to manage mainstream X86 and cloud server environments.

  Ansible was created back in 2012 by Michael DeHaan, the author of the Cobbler provisioning server and co-author of the Fedora Unified Network Controller (Func) framework for remote administration. It’s been widely adopted …

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• Guru: What Do People Have Against Timestamps?

  August 3, 2020 Ted Holt

  In my work I often see database tables and physical files with related date and time fields (columns). By related, I mean that the two fields together indicate a certain time on a certain date for a certain event. I have found these date/time pairs to be difficult to work with at times, so much so that I have come to prefer timestamps.

  I wonder why database architects (I use the term loosely) specify separate date and time fields rather than a timestamp. Having done no scientific survey, I can only guess. I suspect that many tables date back …

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• How IBM Stacks Power Cloud Up Against AWS And Azure

  August 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have our own habits when it comes to thinking about bang for the buck, and it is refreshing sometimes to just think about how other companies think about it.

  As part of the July 14 announcements now almost three weeks ago, IBM not only rolled out new entry Power9 machines with higher I/O bandwidth as well as utility style pricing for on-premises gear to lower capital expenditures. IBM also did a direct comparison of the Power Systems Virtual Server running on the IBM Cloud for a memory-heavy instance and then compared that to fat memory slices running on Amazon …

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• If You Can’t Get To The Tape, It Doesn’t Matter If It Is Dead Or Not

  August 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The coronavirus pandemic has made most IT shops seriously re-evaluate a number of the technologies they have to maintain, operate, backup, and protect their mission-critical applications and their data. And the companies that have IBM i systems as their main platforms are no more insulated from these issues than those who picked other platforms – although it is safe to say that they have very good tools to help with all of the above, and in many cases, these tools are arguably better than – or identical to – what is available for Windows Server, Linux, or other platforms.

  Over …

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