IBM i PTF Guide, The Last Four Weeks

January 10, 2018 Doug Bidwell

IT Jungle went on hiatus in the middle of December, as it does every year, but the PTF beat just keeps on rolling even if the presses don’t. So that means we have a backlog of IBM i PTF Guides to get through here in the first week of publishing The Four Hundred here in 2018.

Let’s take them in chronological order so we don’t lose our minds.

In Volume 19, Number 50 of the IBM i PTF Guide, there was not much happening that week because the holiday season was in even fuller effect. I found the following interesting:

For SAP on IBM i administrators, there are very important fixes included, which should be installed prior to any planned SAP upgrade or installation. For details see, APAR MA46557. (Check the release worksheets in the guide for access to the pertinent Info APAR.)

Samba vulnerabilities have been patched in the Security Group PTF (for each release SF99728 for V7R3, SF99718 for V7R2). For details on the vulnerabilities, go to this link.

The New Group PTF – Db2 Web Query V2.2.1 – Enhancements for DB2 Web Query family of analytics products. More details can be found at this link with these groups:

V7R3 = SF99435
V7R2 = SF99434
V7R1 = SF99433

The latest updates to IBM i Access Client Solutions base package (made in November 2017) are available via the link in the worksheet. The next available update is planned for February 2018 and will require Java 8.

In Volume 19, Number 51 of the IBM i PTF Guide, there was lots of pertinent stuff happening that week. There are new groups for Database and BRMS, TechDocs on support for JDK 8.0 on all releases and DNS info collector in QMGTOOLS, and more. . . . The Documentation on the DNS Collector for IBM i in QMGTOOLS can be found at this link. Documentation on how to disable ADMIN3 of the HTTP Server from starting can be found here. The DB2 group also contains patches for the 5733-OMF OmniFind Text Search Server licensed program product. I was wondering where those patches would show up.

In Volume 19, Number 52 of the IBM i PTF Guide, we reminded everyone once again that Java SDK 6 is no longer being supported on IBM i. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but you will have no help, no bug fixes, and support will remind you to update to Java 8 as your first best step if you have an issue. This means a little more than that, however, it means that IBM is moving its applications off of using Java 6, and they are beginning to do it with the newest Java and HTTP groups. IBM has issued two statements in the below link that bear repeating here.

The first:

“Beginning with IBM i 7.1 SF99368 level 52 and IBM i 7.2 SF99713 level 26, the underlying WebSphere Liberty runtime will be updated to v17.0.0.3 for the IBM Integrated Application Server (IAS) v8.5 and Integrated Web Services (IWS) v2.6 servers, which will no longer support IBM JDK 6.0/6.2.6. If your IAS v8.5 or IWS v2.6 server is currently configured to use JDK 6.0/6.2.6, you will need to modify its configuration to use JDK 7.0 or newer.”

The second:

“This will cause all IAS v8.5 and IWS v2.6 servers configured to use JDK v6.0/v6.2.6 not to start properly after the Group PTF is applied!!!!”

See this link for more. To assist you in this effort, IBM has issued a document and a video, at the embedded links there.

That brings us to Volume 20, Number 1 of the IBM i PTF Guide, here in the New Year. I had the opportunity to do several upgrades from V7R1 to V7R3 over the holidays, and one of the things I found was that SMB2 is the default for V7R3. The links to guide you thru this have been added to the “Links” worksheet in the IBM i PTF Guide. There are recent defective PTFs to take note of on V7R3 and V7R2. These are the ones that made the DB2 Groups released in the middle of November bad. There are none on V7R1:

V7R3/SS1  	V7R2/SS1
SI65764		SI65785               
SI65874		SI65879                          
SI65981		SI65980
SI66048		SI66047
SI66051		SI66054
SI66165		SI66191
SI66245		SI66206
		SI66247

Fix PTF		Fix PTF
SI66537		SI66536

As long as you are doing that one, you should also apply the fixing PTF SI66267 to V7R3 or SI66269 to V7R2. These fix issues with 1 Gb/sec Ethernet adapters 5899 (CCIN 576F).

Now, regarding the recent Spectre and Meltdown security vulnerabilities impacting all microprocessors includes those from IBM in the Power family. “This vulnerability doesn’t allow an external unauthorized party to gain access to a machine, but it could allow a party that has access to the system to access unauthorized data.” Firmware patches for Power7+, Power8 processors became available on January 9, and will be available on January 15 for Power9 chips. Linux operating systems patches will start to become available on January 9 from Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE Linux. AIX and i operating system patches will become available February 12. Information will be available via PSIRT. You can read IBM’s statement here.

IBM i PTF Guide, The Last Four Weeks

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