• RPM And Yum Are A Big Deal For IBM i. Here’s Why

  July 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  By now you’ve probably heard about Yum and RPM, the new processes that IBM will use to deliver open source software to IBM i customers. But you may have questions about how the process works, and what the benefits will be. IT Jungle talked with IBM’s open source guru Jesse Gorzinski to get the low down on why the new tech is so important to the platform.

  RPM, which stands for Red Hat Package Manager, is a piece of software created more than 20 years that allows customers in that Linux community to more easily distribute and install the various …

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• Bringing IBM i WMS To The ‘Boss’

  July 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Boss Manufacturing Company, a 125-year-old manufacturer of boots, gloves, and other workwear, has selected the IBM i-based warehouse management system (WMS) from Logimax to improve the efficiency of its operations, the software company announced last week.

  Boss Manufacturing Company got its start in the late 1880s when a farmer in Kewanee, Illinois, named H.H. Perkins had enough with the current approach to husking corn. His solution was to attach a metal hook a leather strap that would be worn like a glove. Perkins called this invention the Perkins Boss Husker, and it would be the first product for Boss Manufacturing …

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• PTC Refines Handling Of IBM i Database Logic

  July 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  More organizations are moving business logic from RPG and COBOL programs into the DB2 for i database, which most community members agree is a good thing. The IBM i server’s core strength is its integrated a database, after all. However, when business logic moves into the database, it requires customers to rethink how they’re managing the code, which is a mantle that PTC has taken up with its Implementer software change management (SCM) tool.

  When it comes to application modernization, fancy HTML5 screens and mobile apps usually grab the spotlight. We’re often moved by the things we can see, and …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 18

  July 18, 2018 Dan Burger

  The heat wave that has been crushing the U.S. in recent weeks hasn’t cooled off action in the IBM world. This week we catch up on Big Blue’s winning streak in earnings and the fight it is getting ready to mount in the courts. Of course, blockchain remains a hot topic throughout IT and Big Blue is getting some more competition in that arena. Now is also the time to start planning for those fall trips, so take a look at the Calendar for opportunities to keep up on those skills.

  Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

  (Reuters) IBM is …

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• IBM I PTF Guide, Volume 20, Issue 28

  July 18, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Some weeks are crazier than others, and this is one of those weeks with the PTF Guide. We just checked in on PTF Land in Monday issue, but already there are more changes to report. Not the predicted deluge of PTFs we thought we might see, but there are some new HIPERs and WebQuery fixes you will want to look into. There are also a couple of new parms on the TELNET command to check out.

  Here is a look at the Temporary Disk Space Recommended fixes in V7R2:

  Date Added	Fixes			Product	Description
  03/01/2018	MF64483	5770999	Data base run-time 

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• Remain Puts Itself Back On The Map In The United States

  July 16, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software is based in The Netherlands, which is in Europe. That may be news to some of the company’s American customers, which is why the provider of software change management (SCM) solutions for IBM i is opening up a new office in the United States.

  It may be difficult to find The Netherlands (sometimes called Holland) on a map. It’s a relatively small country, a little bigger than the state of Maryland, tucked into the northwest corner of the continent, right next to two other low countries – Belgium and Luxemborg – that geographically challenged Americans may also find …

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• IBM Tweaks Memory And I/O For Entry Power9 Iron

  July 16, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The summer is usually pretty quiet in IBM i Land, and this one is no exception. But things do still happen, and it is our job – and we like our job – to keep you informed of things when they do.

  On July 10, while IT Jungle was away on summer break, Big Blue did some tweaks and changes for various elements of the entry Power9 machines that started rolling out this year. These are all little things, but as usual, the little things can add up.

  In announcement letter 118-058, IBM has interestingly announced a new 8 …

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• Guru: Ready or Not! Part 4 of Big Changes in RDi V9.6, PDM Affinity with Object Table

  July 16, 2018 Susan Gantner

  I’m beginning to feel like a broken record — still more new RDi features with V9.6. I’m excited that there are so many great new features to talk about. In this tip, I’ll cover the primary feature added with fix pack update V9.6.0.3 — enhancements to the Object Table for PDM affinity.

  To me, the enhancements to the Object Table view to make it look and feel much more like PDM are the most significant in the release. There are some other smaller — but still very welcome — enhancements as well, which I’ll cover in a later tip.

  Why …

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• As I See It: The Happiness Template

  July 16, 2018 Victor Rozek

  To a greater or lesser degree, we all wear a necklace of expectations – our own and those of others. As each bead is added and the expectations grow, the cumulative weight can either feel reassuring, like having an instruction manual for your life, or crushing, like a stone.

  For the most part, expectations are well intended, and from an early age they serve as a social template for responsible citizenship. In Western countries, the basics include: graduating from high school; going to college; getting a degree; finding a job; getting married; buying a house; and having children. Broadly speaking, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 25 And 27

  July 16, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Somehow in the summer mix, we managed to skip IBM i PTF Guide number 25, so we are adding it to number 27 to get caught up. There will be another update on Wednesday, and then we will be all caught up. (It was a complicated month here at IT Jungle in July so far. We will leave it at that.)

  Let’s start with number 25. There is an SSL certificate change coming for your HMCs. Check this link for the details.

  On the IBM i Access Client Solutions front, check out the Readme File for 5733-XJ1. That’s Version: 1.1.8.0, …

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• Removing The Last Governor: Core Software Pricing

  July 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This being near the July 4th holiday in America, which is a significant time for me and my life with The Four Hundred, I am going to ask your indulgence and tell you a story or two.

  When I first moved to New York City way back in December 1988, it was not the first time that I had encountered a recession. But it was an important one that changed my life and, I like to think, yours.

  My parents were the grandchildren of farmers, and their parents worked in the factories of upstate rural New Jersey – there …

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• VACAVA’s Low-Code Approach To Modernization

  July 9, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have lots of options when it comes to application modernization. At one end of the spectrum are screen-scraper tools, which can provide a quick fix for shops tired with the 5250 interface. IBM i shops with more time, money, and inspiration may choose to completely rewrite their application on a new platform. Somewhere in between lies RapidBIZ, a low-code modernization affair from VACAVA.

  The folks at VACAVA knows a thing or two about the IBM i platform. For starters, the company is based in Rochester, Minnesota, home of the world-famous IBM lab where the AS/400 was created …

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• Guru: Speed Up Web Pages Using Apache’s mod_deflate

  July 9, 2018 Alan Seiden

  If your web applications run on HTTP Server (Powered by Apache) for i, you can enable a powerful Apache extension, mod_deflate, to speed up your site. Just as zipping up files on your PC saves space and accelerates file transfers, mod_deflate “allows output from your server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network.” (See https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_deflate.html for more information.) My tests show a speed improvement of 10 to 50 percent.

  You can compress any text-based output, including HTML (whether plain .html files, output from RPG CGI programs, PHP, or other languages), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 9

  July 9, 2018 Dan Burger

  Summer may be in full swing but the IT community has yet to go into vacation mode. There is still a lot of action happening around our industry, including new champions in the worlds of big and small supercomputing. The women of IT also continue to make their mark as we look at another profile of female leadership in computing, this time on IBM’s Summit project. Now is the time to start planning for those Fall conferences so be sure to take a look at our Calendar below for many opportunities for networking and continuing your IT education.

  Top Stories

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 26

  July 9, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  We are running the IBM i PTF Guide in the Monday edition of The Four Hundred this week, just to keep you on your toes during our summer holiday schedule. There was a lot of stuff going on even with the July 4 holiday in the United States impending before we went to press.

  This week we have new Groups for HIPER and Java, and, a new version of QMGTOOLS, for all three releases. The Java groups for each release have significant vulnerabilities. The fixes are included in the latest Java group for each release:

  • Release 7.3 – SF99725 level

  … Read more

• Lamps Plus Sheds Light On Modernization Integration

  June 25, 2018 Dan Burger

  Discussions about modernization continue to tie top management in knots. Questions about the time, the effort, and the risks to the business are difficult to answer with precision, so organizations habitually focus on obstacles rather than opportunities.

  “If you stay in that mindset, you will never move,” says Derrick Lindsey, a modernization project lead at Lamps Plus, the nation’s largest specialty lighting retailer and a leading manufacturer of lighting and home furnishings. “There’s a lot less risk in modernizing existing applications on the IBM i than migrating off of the IBM i platform to other platforms such as Unix, Linux, …

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• Trinity Guard Gives Audit Tool A Friendly GUI

  June 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IT professionals who are tired of using 5250 greenscreens to manually conduct regulatory audits of their IBM i systems may be interested in a colorful piece of software from Trinity Guard. The company recently launched TGCentral, which is a unified HTML interface designed to simplify the configuration and execution of security and regulatory audits across multiple IBM i servers.

  As the spiritual and intellectual successor to PentaSafe, Trinity Guard understands how beloved those old PentaSafe products were. Even though NetIQ/Attachmate/Micro Focus has not added any new features to its IBM i security suite for over a decade, there were …

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• Guru: Table Value Constructors Build Tables On The Fly

  June 25, 2018 Ted Holt

  Because I wish to be as valuable and productive as possible to the people who pay me to program their computers, I continually search the Web for new ideas and techniques. Doing so often leads me to sites that cater to other computing platforms. Today I want to share with you some SQL techniques that I learned from Microsoft SQL Server professionals.

  These techniques are based on the Table Value Constructor (TVC), which is a group of data values, usually literals, organized into rows and columns. In its simplest form, a table value constructor is literal tabular data that is …

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• A Better Way To Skin The IBM i Cloud Cat

  June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may come as a surprise, but many IBM i resellers and distributors with aspirations of providing true cloud-style Power Systems iron running IBM i and its predecessor operating systems are just as disappointed in Big Blue’s pricing and packaging practices as customers themselves. More than a few IBM i customers, and indeed some OS/400 V5R3 and i5/OS V5R4 customers, sorely wish there was a way to buy capacity on Power Systems that looked and smelled and tasted more like what Amazon Web Services and a zillion other service providers offer for X86 iron running Windows Server or Linux.

  Jim …

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• IT Spending To Boom In 2018, Tails Off In 2019

  June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to say what is the cart and what is the horse in the elements that make up an economy. Our sense of how well or poorly the economy is doing actually affects how we react and therefore how we actually spend on goods and services, and therefore there is always an element of self-fulfilling prophecy mixed in with the underlying fundamentals. It is hard to predict what an economy is going to do, much less 185 different ones that are interconnected on planet Earth, and it is even harder, perhaps, to reckon what one aspect of those …

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