• In The API World, Nobody Knows You Are An IBM i

  August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

  Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. …

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• RDi On Mac Users Are In For A Big Sur-prise

  August 2, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who run Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) on macOS are running into trouble getting the IDE to run on the latest release of macOS Big Sur, version 11.5. However, with patience and perseverance, IBM i developers are finding ways to get it to run. An official fix from IBM has yet to be made.

  Reports of problems getting RDi 9.6 to run on Big Sur emerged in June, when users began to post reports on IBM i chat boards, including the new IBM Community site. Users reported problems installing RDi on Big Sur, as well as …

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• Guru: Elapsed Time For Human Beings

  August 2, 2021 Ted Holt

  Quick! Think of a weird animal! Perhaps you thought of the platypus, a duck-billed mammal that lays eggs. Maybe Dr. Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu jumped to mind. Maybe you thought of a politician or a musician or your next-door neighbor. I know a weird animal that you probably didn’t think of.

  The weird animal I have in mind is called the duration. This animal is found in SQL queries. There are three species: timestamp, date, and time. Today I write about the challenges of interacting with this strange entity. I’ll use the timestamp duration as an example. Interacting with date …

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• No More Shouting The Name “Power” (Well, Except In Our Title Here)

  August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The marketing people at IBM have been at work again, apparently, and it looks like there will be some subtle branding changes coming with the launch of Power10-based servers later this year, very likely by September or maybe October.

  One of my pet peeves about the IT industry is that vendors sometimes feel compelled to shout their company names or product brands when it is completely unnecessary. They seem to choose a brand and then work backwards to come up with some abbreviation that they think is clever. It’s when they overreach that it gets annoying, and language is my …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 31

  August 2, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  In this edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, we want to remind you once again that when you go to Fix Central at IBM to download PTFs to patch your IBM i operating systems and related systems software, you must use an encrypted variant of FTP to do so – that’s FTPS or SFTP, depending – as of July 10. If you follow all of the links starting with the Fix Central homepage, you will eventually get to this link right here, which tells you how to configure SFTP on your machine. We interpret this to mean that …

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• One IBM i Shop’s Close Call With Ransomware

  July 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Think the ransomware epidemic won’t affect you, that it’s somebody else’s problem? After reading this story about one IBM i shop’s recent experience with cybercriminals, it may have you thinking twice about your approach to security.

  Greg is the IT manager at a midsize distribution company located in the South. IT Jungle is abiding by his request to keep his last name and the name of his company out of this article. But Greg was determined to share his story with the wider IBM i community, in the hopes that it will spur them to take the ransomware threat seriously, …

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• The Three Challenges To Securing Your IBM i Platform

  July 28, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever you have to tackle a complex problem, it is best to break it down and then figure out a way to take on the most important and impactful issues first. And when it comes to securing the IBM i platform, nobody knows better than Carol Woodbury, president and chief technology officer at DXR Security, about how to take this “securable” system and lock it down.

  Woodbury spent 16 years at IBM from 1984 through 2000, rising to become security team leader for the AS/400 platform and eventually becoming chief engineering manager for security for the platform. After leaving Big …

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• IBM i Support Added To IBM Spectrum Protect Backup Software

  July 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  At long last, IBM has added IBM i support to Spectrum Protect, its enterprise backup product. After numerous requests for IBM i support, IBM quietly made the change in November by presenting Spectrum Protect as an S3-compatible storage repository, which is supported on the IBM i via the Cloud Storage Solutions for i (5733-ICC) offering, IBM product managers said recently.

  For many years, IBM supported IBM i with Tivoli Storage Manager, the flagship enterprise backup offering that eventually was renamed IBM Spectrum Protect. However, IBM let the IBM i support lapse, an event that was noticed by many IBM i …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 28

  July 28, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  It’s been a minute since out last issue of Monitor. Hopefully many of you have been able to enjoy a little summer fun (as we did here in the Jungle) but it’s time to hunker back down as we look forward to a busy fall season. So let’s get down to business. While we use this forum to share relevant and interesting news and events from around the computing world, this week we’d like to point you to a fascinating story of our own. In our Top Story below, editor Alex Woodie talks with an IBM shop that recently survived …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 30

  July 28, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Back on May 8, we told you that Access Client Services 1.1.8.7 was being replaced by ACS 1.1.8.8 because of a bug in its code. On May 15, in the following week’s issue, we apologized because what we heard through our channels turned out to not be true. Today, we found the following document, which we are adding to the IBM i PTF Guide, which is dated May 4 and provides three different workarounds for the issue that we thought was going to compel IBM to upgrade to ACS 1.1.8.8.

  Anyway, of the three workarounds recommended for the …

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• Awaiting The Power10 Rollout And The New Sales Cycle

  July 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is difficult to be patient but before too long IBM will begin shipping Power10-based systems and the product line, which has been bumping along at the tail end of the Power9 cycle, will start growing again. With IBM having a new microarchitecture as well as a new foundry partner, Samsung Electronics, which is making its very first server chip with the Power10 and implementing its first large-scale chip with a 7 nanometer process, the stakes are high and IBM is being a little extra cautious in getting the Power10 chip out the door.

  Enterprise customers are risk averse, and …

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• Giving IBM i The Storage Of Last Resort

  July 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every IT ecosystem has its niche players, and they are a vital part of that ecosystem just as are niche players as in the natural ecosystem. Lots of companies bridge the gaps between products and allow customers to do something that would be hard for them to replicate on their own. This brings real value.

  Entrepid Corporation is one such niche player in the IBM i and broader Power Systems market, and it bridges the gap between IBM’s Power-based systems commonly used as database and application servers in midrange and large enterprises and the storage offered by EMC before and …

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• Guru: Getting Meaningful Audit Information from a Journal

  July 26, 2021 Paul Tuohy

  Journaling is an invaluable tool that is used for data recovery, data replication, commitment control and, of course, auditing. But getting at the audit information in an easy-to-use manner can be cumbersome. In this article I want to introduce you to a stored procedure that will create an audit table for any table/physical file and a corresponding view that can be used for easy auditing of changes.

  For example, if I am auditing the EMPLOYEE table (I will be using the EMPLOYEE table in the standard Db2 Sample Database) for a change to the SALARY column, I would use the …

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• Innovating And Thriving with IBM i

  July 26, 2021 Alex Woodie

  You may have noticed that the IBM i server has developed a certain reputation, and it’s not always a good one. There are folks among us who consider IBM i to be a “legacy” platform, something that should be invested in as little as possible and moved away from at the earliest convenience. But as a panel of experts at the recent OCEAN conference demonstrated, it is possible to not only innovate on the IBM i, but to create a culture where the business and its employees can thrive.

  The Orange County Educational Advancement Network, or OCEAN, pulled together …

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• IBM Thwarts Ransomware in FlashSystem with New Data Safeguard

  July 26, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The steep uptick in ransomware attacks this summer has gained the full attention of business and tech leaders at businesses of all sizes. It also has the attention of IT vendors, including IBM, which last week added a new data protection mechanism to FlashSystem intended to help thwart ransomware attacks.

  Ransomware, which has been simmering on the security backburner for years, has roared to life this summer, thanks to several high-profile attacks that caused severe business disruptions, including Colonial Pipeline, JBS, and Scripps Health, among others. While the attacks on these large companies were headline-grabbing, they bely the full …

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• Time To Design – And Deliver – The Application System/360

  July 19, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The stupidest thing IBM ever did was create a system other than the System/360. It had the perfect name and it had the right idea of creating a compatible line of small, medium, and large enterprise systems that ran a widening variety of operating systems and workloads, often concurrent on the same machine. The AS/400 really should have been the third generation of System/360 machines, and the systems today would be somewhere around the sixth of seventh or even tenth generation, however you want to think about it.

  Every decade or so in IBM’s history, it has tried to converge …

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• How IBM i Fits Into a Zero-Trust Security Framework

  July 19, 2021 Alex Woodie

  One of the hot new trends in cybersecurity these days is the zero-trust security model. Instead of implicitly trusting network traffic behind the firewall, zero-trust demands that traffic have explicit permission to be there. But how does that model work with the strange beast known as IBM i? IT Jungle recently sat down with PJ Kirner, the CTO and co-founder of zero-trust software provider Illumio, to find out.

  Illumio is an eight-year-old venture-backed startup based in Sunnyvale, California, that is working in the field of zero-trust security. It develops an offering, called Illumio Core, that allows companies to begin implementing …

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• Guru: One-Shot Requests and Quoted Column Names

  July 19, 2021 Ted Holt

  If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me to query data for them over the years, I could have retired already. (I did not say I would have, but that I could have.) It’s nice when the users can retrieve the information they need to do their jobs without help from IT, but when a request is too complex for them, I’m always glad to help.

  I’ve used many tools over the years for one-shot requests for raw data. These days my tool of choice is the Run SQL Scripts tool, which is part of IBM …

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• As I See It: Delusionware

  July 19, 2021 Victor Rozek

  Currency has always been the product of mass hallucination. From shells to spices, bottle caps to urine, what people decide is valuable, and what they are willing to trade life energy for, is as varied as imagination and circumstance. (In case you’re wondering, clean urine is used in prisons to pass drug tests and can be bartered for goods and services that are best left unnamed.)

  All that is required for a currency to have value is that enough people share the same delusion. And suddenly, little pieces of paper with numbers and the faces of departed presidents (and lesser …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 29

  July 19, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to the latest edition of the IBM i PTF Guide. In this week’s edition, you will find updated microcode for Firmware 860. The latest service pack 860.A0 is now available for System firmware level SC860 and SV860. You can find more at this link.

  Also, IBM is announcing PTFs MH01895 and MH01896, which are an ifix for HMC V9 R1 M942. You can find out more in this link.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs
  • Db2 for IBM i
  • IBM Db2 Mirror for i

  PTF Groups …

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