• IBM Kills iAccess for Windows, Older RDi Versions

  April 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Spring is still weeks away in the Upper Midwest, where it still feels like winter. But that didn’t stop the IBM i leadership in Rochester, Minnesota from embarking upon some spring cleaning by sending out to pasture some development tooling and admin interfaces for IBM i, including older releases of RDi and all of iAccess for Windows.

  IBM yesterday announced that effective April 30, 2019, it will withdraw IBM i Access for Windows. That announcement puts the final nail in the coffin of the old Windows-based client that traces its roots back to OpsNav.

  Here’s the short announcement posted to …

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• GDPR Data Discovery On Tap from Raz-Lee

  April 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  With less than six weeks to go before the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect, it’s crunch time for remediation. For IBM i shops that aren’t sure where sensitive data resides in their databases, a power tool from Raz-Lee Security can provide some automated relief.

  The GDPR represents a dramatic overhaul of the privacy laws governing what companies can do with data about European citizens. Backed by the central European Union government, the GDPR provides sweeping new rules that require any organization storing data about EU citizens to obtain consent for that data, to ensure that it’s protected, …

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• ‘Air Gap’ Your Data with Tape, LTO Group Says

  April 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Here’s one more reason why tape’s demise has been prematurely recorded: Tape helps to protect data by providing an “air gap” between live production systems and protected data. That’s according to a new report sponsored by the LTO group. In other news, IBM made an LTO announcement that’s pertinent to IBM i shops.

  In a new white paper issued last week, IDC raised the specter of tape-based storage systems providing an air gap that is actively thwarting attempts by cybercriminals to compromise production systems, in those that would otherwise be vulnerable to ransomware attacks.

  “Recently, tape has shown itself to …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 18

  April 18, 2018 Dan Burger

  Who runs the world? This week in Monitor we see a trend in stories from the web featuring female leadership. IBM is no newb to promoting women to leadership positions (do we really need to make the Ginni Rometty reference here?), and this week CNBC takes a closer look at IBM’s female-helmed blockchain team, which is unusual in the male-dominated space.

  IBM’s first chief privacy officer also speaks with AdWeek this week about the changes in corporate privacy over the last 20 years.

  Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

  (CNBC) Blockchain is a hot trend in tech, and the fact …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 15

  April 18, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Hello fellow residents of IBM i Land. (You know that know man is an iLand, right? Anyway . . . .) In this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, the Java group was updated on all releases. Now that HTTP Admin is converting to JDK 8, if you are running Java applications – and who isn’t running Java applications these days at least some of the time – this is worth checking out.

  See the following in the IBM i PTF Guide:

  • V7R3 SF99725
  • V7R2 SF99716
  • V7R1 SF99572

  Another warning: IBM i Access for Web, product …

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• The Platform Matters More Than Ever, The Operating System Less So

  April 16, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those of us who have been in the IBM midrange for three or four decades are so used to thinking about systems and application platforms for so long it is hard to remember that this sort of thinking is fairly new to the rest of the IT community that did not grow up on proprietary mainframes or midrange gear. Platforms matter more than ever and continue to evolve, but that core operating system – the basic kernel that runs on a processor and has some management features on it – is changing very slowly.

  This is not a bad thing. …

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• IBM Patches Samba Vulnerabilities In IBM i

  April 16, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue has issued two patches for serious flaws in IBM i’s implementation of Samba, flaws that could result in an attacker launching a denial of service attack or changing user’s passwords. The company patched IBM i 7.2 and 7.3, as support for IBM i 7.1 wanes.

  On April 3, IBM published a security bulletin informing users of the existence of two flaws in IBM i, as well as the existence of two program temporary fixes (PTFs) to patch the problems. Both of the flaws involve Samba, a free and open source implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol to provide interoperability …

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• Guru: RDi and Refactoring

  April 16, 2018 Ted Holt

  When I first heard the term refactoring, I thought, “So that’s what they call it.” I had been refactoring for years, my only tools being SEU and a compiler listing. I learned a long time ago that refactoring is often necessary to enhance code, especially poorly written code. Another reason I often refactor is to better understand poor code.

  To refactor means to rewrite source code without changing its external behavior. Due to all the “legacy” source code (RPG II, RPG III, fixed-form RPG IV, OCL, etc.) in IBM i shops, the ability to refactor source code is a …

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• As I See It: The Curse Of The Clever

  April 16, 2018 Victor Rozek

  By all accounts, Neville Chamberlain was a clever man. Clever enough to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. But it turned out he was also stunningly naïve, signing the Munich Agreement granting Germany the right to annex the Czech Sudetenland in return for a promise of peace, thus emboldening one of history’s great monsters, Adolf Hitler.

  The consequences of extreme cleverness and dangerous naiveté play out across the entire spectrum of human interactions, but are perhaps most visible in politics and business. The pursuit of power and money invites troves of uber-clever people who all too soon become enamored …

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• Tesla Teases IBM i Software Vendor Into Some Experimental Coding

  April 16, 2018 Dan Burger

  First of all, let me assure you this is not Car & Driver. You’re going to hear about a car and a driver, but the resemblance stops there. The driver is Alex Roytman and the car is a Tesla Model 3. I’d describe the car as a “cross-over” because it appeals to driving enthusiasts and technology geeks. I’d describe Roytman as an enthusiast, more so in the second category than the first.

  Loyal IT Jungle readers are familiar with Roytman because he’s the CEO of Profound Logic, an IBM i modernization company specializing in Web and mobile application …

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• Profound Rolls Out Node.js Development Services

  April 11, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to get into Node.js development but lack the technical know-how to work with the language may be interested in a new professional service unveiled by Profound Logic last month in which the company will do the actual development work for you.

  Node.js has become one of the most popular development languages for a variety of reasons, including the way it unifies JavaScript for back-end and front-end work, the modular nature of Node.js apps, and the overall agility it gives to developers, particularly those building real-time apps that need to run across multiple platforms. The fact …

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• Jack Henry Banking On De Novos Surge

  April 11, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The future of computing might be headed to clouds, blockchain, and analytics everywhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of big iron. In fact, banking software developer Jack Henry & Associates reports that sales of its flagship IBM i-based SilverLake software are going strong, particularly among de novo banks in the past year.

  Jack Henry has a solid reputation for developing banking software used by midsized banks and credit unions. The Missouri company has more than 9,000 customers, including a fair number that use SilverLake, which is considered a best-in-class banking platform.

  In recent months, Jack Henry has been …

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• Human Error Driving Data Breaches, Studies Find

  April 11, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Preventable errors – including clicking on malicious links sent as part of a phishing attack and misconfiguring servers and network devices – account for a large number of data breaches, according to a pair of studies released last week by IBM and Baker Hostetler.

  In IBM‘s annual X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2018, the company concluded that “inadvertent insiders” — or employees who unwittingly cause security incidents through negligent actions – accounted for two-thirds of all the records that were comprised in 2017. IBM says nearly 3 billion records were compromised last year, which is actually down from the 4 …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 11

  April 11, 2018 Dan Burger

  “Hey, Pops! How many people died in the Digital Revolution?” This week in Monitor you’ll find a story that provides an aerial view where the path of disruptive technology is as easy to follow as a F5 tornado. The Rochester Post Bulletin describes what its town has seen. And what about the American Dream? The story from ProPublica records eyewitness sources from places where some of the heaviest casualties took place.

  Technology’s impacts on society should be recognized for what they are. So, don’t bypass the Forbes article with insights on how to lead a company and its inhabitants through …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 14

  April 11, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  There are a bunch of nips and tucks for the IBM i operating system in this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, but nothing that will keep you awake at night as sometimes happen on all platforms in the enterprise.

  If you are running encryption on your backups, you may want to take a look at this link. The issue is that tape processing fails if the QTADECRYPT data area is found in QUSRSYS and if the keystore file listed in the QTADECRYPT data area is missing from the system. All current releases – IBM i …

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• Counting The Cost Of IBM i On Power9 Entry Systems

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every time there is a Moore’s Law advance in processing, whether companies charge by the core or by the socket, there is price cut – in theory at least – for systems software. This is true if the chip maker decides to goose the performance of the cores or add more cores to a socket, or both at the same time.

  In the past several generations of Power processors used in the Power Systems line, IBM has done both. Because the systems software is based on cores, however, the move from two to four to eight to 12 cores per …

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• What A Concept: Distribution Software Aimed At Real SMBs

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Time may pass in the IBM midrange, and systems and business practices have evolved, but the one thing that does not change is that some companies, especially those on the smaller size with limited resources to devote to IT hardware and software, want a simple system that just lets them do the work they need to do.

  The simplicity of the System/3X family, which has its start way back with the System/3 in 1969 and runs up through the System/38 in 1979 and the System/36 in 1983, up through the AS/400 in 1988 and up through the iSeries, System i, …

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• Guru: Dealing With Non-Normalized Data

  April 9, 2018 Jon Paris

  From time to time, many of us have to find solutions for handling our old non-normalized tables in an efficient manner. It would be nice to have the luxury of redesigning and normalizing these databases, but real life is not like that. This is particularly true when the tables in question are part of an application package where you have no control over the file layout.

  I should point out that by “efficient” in this context I don’t necessarily mean processing speed, but rather in terms of the number of lines of code needed to perform the necessary manipulations and/or …

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• COMMON Changes Things Up With PowerUp 2018

  April 9, 2018 Alex Woodie

  We are six weeks away from the first inaugural PowerUp conference, the new name that COMMON has given to its annual meeting and exposition. While the new name has drawn some feedback, the changes that COMMON is making to the conference itself are expected to be the big head turners next month in San Antonio. We check in with the user group’s president, Justin Porter, for the good news.

  Let’s start with PowerUp, a name that not only reflects COMMON‘s affiliation with IBM and its Power Systems servers, but also reflects the notion of “up skilling,” the activity most …

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• Pushing The Capacity Envelopes With IBM i 7.3

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every piece of systems software has some sort of maximum capabilities reference, and these documents are interesting in their own right to help system administrators, programmers, and database administrators, as they case may be, figure out where they might hit a ceiling in terms of capacity or performance.

  IBM has just published the Availability Maximum Capacities reference for IBM i Version 7 Release 3, which you can take a gander at here. As this reference correctly points out, coming close to the performance limits – or many of them at the same time – can cause outages. In this, …

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