• Bob Code Assistant Gets Better Understanding Of IBM i Applications

  November 9, 2026 Alex Woodie

  It has been barely six months since the Bob code assistant became generally available, and just four months since Big Blue shipped the Premium Package for i, which introduced new modes and tools that make Bob useful for IBM i users. But IBM and the open community have not slowed down the pace of development one iota, with two releases of Bob Premium Pack for i in the past two months, including new features to helps IBM i developers understand their applications.

  If you are an IBM i developer who is serious about being productive with Bob, you are going …

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• IBM i In The Cloud And The Case For Reversing Replication

  November 9, 2026 Ash Giddings

  When IBM i organizations start looking at the cloud, the conversation often follows a familiar path. Start with low-risk workloads such as development or test, consider running disaster recovery in the cloud, and keep production on-premise. Perfectly sensible. It’s relatively low risk, builds confidence, and gives the organization a manageable starting point.

  But another approach deserves more attention. Run production in the cloud, replicate back to an on-premise system, take backups from that local target, and store them offsite. Turn the familiar arrangement around 180 degrees.

  For organizations considering a hardware refresh, reviewing data center costs, or assessing the skills …

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• Guru: From Hiking Boots To Long-Term Memory

  November 9, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  In my last article, “Environment Variables: Global Variables Wearing Hiking Boots,” we explored how environment variables can carry information around an IBM i job, making it available to programs and procedures along the way.

  But what if our variables don’t need to go hiking? What if we simply need them to remember where they’ve been? As RPG developers, we’re accustomed to declaring variables, assigning values, and expecting those values to be there when we need them. But have you ever considered what happens to those variables when a procedure ends? Or what happens when you call that same procedure again? …

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• Inside IBM’s New PowerHA Cloud Offering, Full System Manager

  November 9, 2026 Alex Woodie

  As part of the Fall 2026 Technology Refresh, IBM launched a new product called PowerHA Full System Manager that’s designed to provide high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to IBM i customers running in IBM’s PowerVS cloud environment. The new offering delivers full system replication via an asynchronous replication protocol, failover capabilities, and point-in-time copies. It also provides data isolation guarantees that can be challenging to achieve in shared, multi-tenant cloud environments.

  IBM i customers who run servers off-premise or in the cloud have had high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) capabilities available to them for some time. In fact, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 39

  November 9, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  This week, the IBM i platform has several issues, as well as two new security vulnerabilities for you to take a look at.

  First, there is this issue: eMudhra CA Certificate Compromise: Impact on IBM SDK, Java Technology Edition, which you can find more information about at this link. This explains the issue with the eMudhra intermediate CA certificate compromise issue and remediation. Note as well: The information in the previous Flash Alert has been revised. Please review the following updated guidance.

  Then there is this issue: IBM i Java Development Kit 8 64 & 32 bit VMs Fail …

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• Power Systems Turns In Another Great Quarter

  November 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been saying for some time that we think that Big Blue can get the Power Systems hardware business, including servers and operating systems but not including various kinds of tech support, to rise above $2 billion in annual sales. And by all indications, now that IBM has turned in three of the four quarters for the year, it looks like 2026 will indeed be that year.

  “Storage delivered record revenue growth and continue to gain market share with broad-based demand across Flash, Fusion, tape and IBM Z storage,” explained James Kavanaugh, IBM’s chief financial officer, explained on a …

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• Big Blue Is Right On Schedule With Fall 2026 IBM i Tech Refreshes

  November 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  After delaying the spring Technology Refreshes for three months earlier this year, IBM is back on track with the fall TRs. IBM i shops will find a raft of new capabilities in the newly announced IBM i 7.6 TR3 and 7.5 TR9, including new services for tracking security patches, performance improvements for networking and storage, and sundry other improvements up and down and across the stack.

  Big Blue announced IBM i 7.6 TR3 and IBM i 7.5 TR9 on October 27, and plans to deliver the new capabilities and updates on November 20, although some components of the announcement will …

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• Guru: Environment Variables – Global Variables Wearing Hiking Boots

  November 2, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  Sometimes a program knows one tiny piece of information that another program, several calls farther down the stack, needs to know.

  The obvious solution is to add another parameter. But sometimes that requires that new parameter added to one or more programs in the call stack. Before long, we’re passing a mushroom basket through half the forest even though most of the programs along the way have no interest in what’s inside it.

  There is another option that has been available on IBM i for a very long time: environment variables. IBM i supports both job-level and system-level environment variables. …

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• A New IBM i Entity Takes Shape: Power By Fortra

  November 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Attendees of the COMMON NAViGATE conference last week were able to catch a glimpse of a new organization making its way in the IBM i world: Power by Fortra. The entity is not a separate company from Fortra. Rather, it’s a virtual carveout of sorts of all of Fortra’s IBM i products as well as its IBM i-focused employees. And according to Power by Fortra general manager Geoff Fischer, it’s here to stay.

  “We’re still a part of Fortra,” Fischer told IT Jungle in a recent interview about Power by Fortra rebrand. “We’re still a business unit within Fortra. Nothing …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 38

  November 2, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to this week, where the IBM i platform has two issues you need to be aware of as well as a security bulletin. Yup, we said “a” there, meaning only one, meaning it looks like people were out trick or treating instead of bug hunting. Which is fine.

  The first issue is related to Access Client Services. IBM has put out a note that warns: “Versions 1.1.9.1 through 1.1.9.16 are vulnerable to memory exhaustion via a malicious SFTP server sending unsolicited replies. The SFTP client (Apache MINA SSHD) did not verify that incoming replies corresponded to previously sent requests …

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• Critical PHP2Shell Security Vulns Evoke ‘Black October’

  October 26, 2026 Alex Woodie

  AI helped uncover a pair of critical security vulnerabilities in PHP that can be used to execute code, including on IBM i servers, sent administrators around the world scrambling to install patches on a large swath of the Internet’s Web servers before cybercriminals can get to them. The flaws, along with the rapid dissemination of AI-based exploit code, led some organizations to simply unplug their websites, earning the whole episode the name “Black October.”

  On October 21, patches for two critical security vulnerabilities in PHP were released. The two vulns, CVE-2026-109619 and CVE-2026-109618, collectively called PHP2Shell, each garnered a …

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• Why Fortra Partnered with FalconStor to Launch Continuity Care: A Validated Recovery Service for IBM i

  October 26, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With over 7,000 Power Systems customers, Fortra is one of the largest software conglomerates serving the IBM i and AIX communities and it is by far the largest supplier of systems software for Power Systems. The company is also a key development partner of Big Blue, having nine years ago taken over enhancements to Rational Developer for i, Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) on i, and PowerHA SystemMirror for i.

  As such, Fortra is a perfect partner for FalconStor Software as it seeks to expand the use of its Habanero off-site data protection SaaS and its related Cloud Clean …

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• Guru: Analyzing User Session Statistics, Part 2

  October 26, 2026 Mike Larsen

  In part one of this tip, I showed how to determine the number of times a user signed in and signed out of IBM i for a given period. In this tip, I will show how to get the days a user signed in, and how long their session was active.

  I use the same table function, QSYS2.HISTORY_LOG_INFO, as before. The code (Figure 1 below) is similar to the code used in the first part of this series, but there are some differences I will point out.

  Note that I purposely left the user ID out of the result set …

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• Fresche Launches OpsIQ, a Free AI-Based Operation Assistant for IBM i

  October 26, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers have embraced AI-based coding tools, such as IBM’s Bob and Anthropic’s Claude Code, but IBM i administrators so far haven’t benefited from the AI productivity boost in the same way. That is starting to change, and one of the first AI-based administrative helpers is a free tool launched recently by Fresche called OpsIQ.

  OpsIQ is an AI assistant designed to help IBM i users get answers to questions about their systems. It is currently a read-only tool for helping users interrogate the system for information about server configurations, the state of jobs, and errors or alerts, which …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 37

  October 26, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Well, brace yourself. We have two things you need to be aware of and a slew, an absolute slew, of security vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack.

  To begin with, IBM System Planning Tool for POWER processor-based systems – SPT Version 6.26.286.0 is available for download. You can get it HERE.

  And then there is Potential WebSphere Application Server problems when deployed behind a WebSphere-aware proxy server, where a WebSphere application running behind a HTTP proxy server may begin experiencing failures with client certificate based authentication, or if client IP addresses or connection information are reported incorrectly as those …

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• Fall TRs Expected Next Week At Combined IBM-COMMON Conference

  October 19, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue delayed its spring Technology Refreshes for IBM i earlier by three months this year so that it could simultaneously announce the new entry level Power server. It seems very unlikely that we’ll see such a delay for the fall TR, however, as IBM gears up for its semi-annual announcement for the still-popular midrange server at next week’s combined IBM-COMMON conference.

  There are several indicators that the fall TR is looming. For starters, IBM essentially said that the fall TR is coming in the description for one of its upcoming IBM i Guided Tours, which have become the …

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• GenAI Brings A New Kind Of Agile Computing That Needs Controls Even More

  October 19, 2026 Michel Mouchon

  As if trying to make use of a whole new computing architecture and coming up with the budget to experiment and roll features into production were not enough, there are a slew of issues when bringing GenAI to the IBM i datacenter.

  There are those who say that people cannot learn from the experience of others. We have never believed that. Which is why we want to share some of the hard-won wisdom we have developed four years after the ChatGPT moment that rocked the world and that is changing many things. But not everything needs to change or will …

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• IBM i, AI, And The Cost Of “We’ve Always Done It That Way”

  October 19, 2026 Peg Tuttle

  I’ve spent more than 30 years in the IBM i community, and I’ve heard one phrase more times than I can count: “We’ve always done it that way.” Sometimes it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Other times, I think it might be one of the most dangerous things we can say about a technology environment.

  Think about it. IBM i has been running mission-critical business applications for decades. Manufacturing, distribution, financial services, healthcare, retail. These systems process orders, manage inventory, run financial applications, and support operations that cannot afford to stop.

  And they do it remarkably well.

  That reliability is one …

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• Infor Says IBM i Customers Are Welcome To Use New AI

  October 19, 2026 Alex Woodie

  This month, Infor launched new AI software designed to help its ERP customers automate specific business processes in industry verticals. While the AI capability uses Infor’s cloud environment, customers that run Infor’s IBM i-based ERP software on-prem can also partake of the new capabilities, Infor tells IT Jungle.

  In early October, Infor launched the latest release of its Infor Velocity Suite, which is a collection of AI agents, generative AI capabilities, process mining, and automation built for specific industries. Infor first launched its Velocity Suite in April 2025 to turn customers into “agentic enterprises” where AI agents go beyond …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 36

  October 19, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Just a reminder that with IBM i 7.6 TR2 and IBM i 7.5 TR8, there is a virtual Ethernet connectivity advisory. IBM is currently investigating a reported issue affecting systems running IBM i 7.6 TR2 or IBM i 7.5 TR8. Installing the Technology Refresh (TR) can cause a complete loss of network connectivity on partitions using Virtual Ethernet adapter type 268C. IBM is actively working to identify the root cause and appropriate corrective action.

  Development has identified the root cause of the issue and has released the following HIPER PTFs to address it. You can read more about this issue …

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