Alex Woodie
Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine. Before joining Midrange Computing, Alex was a staff writer for The Insurance Journal and a reporter and columnist with The Paradise Post newspaper. Woodie obtained his Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism from Humboldt State University in 1997. Upon graduation, Alex intended to make his way onto a major daily newspaper, but in 1999 he found himself drawn to the high-technology industry, where his background in science and engineering has suited him well. He lives in Northern San Diego County. When he is not writing next week's newsletters, Alex can be found in his favorite chair reading the day's paper, in the kitchen, or at the beach.
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Raz-Lee Simplifies MFA for IBM i
April 24, 2024 Alex Woodie
The need for multi-factor authentication (MFA) has never been higher, as cybercriminals continue to compromise corporate and governmental systems to steal data and hold systems for ransom. That market need has led Raz-Lee Security to add several new features to its MFA solution that should help its customers stop, or at least significantly slow, unauthorized access to IBM i.
Raz-Lee Security has sold MFA as part of its comprehensive iSecurity suite for several years, going back at least to December 2021, according to the company’s release notes for the product. With this month’s update to Raz-Lee MFA, the company has …
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IBM Cranks Up the Performance for Run SQL Scripts
April 24, 2024 Alex Woodie
Access Client Solutions (ACS) users who are tired of waiting for database fields to resolve in the Run SQL Scripts (RSS) facility will be happy to hear that IBM felt their pain and RSS will return data much more quickly to return data with ACS version 1.1.9.5, which IBM shipped earlier this month.
The speed-up of field resolution time was listed as a concern to at least one IBM i user, who took to IBM Power Ideas Portal to voice his or her concern. “Simply put the resolution of potential field makes content assist almost unusable,” the user wrote. “I …
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Rocket DevOps Gets Update for Free Format RPG, VS Code, and DORA
April 24, 2024 Alex Woodie
The latest release of Rocket’s change management tool for IBM i brings several new capabilities, including improved support for VS Code and Free Form RPG. Rocket DevOps version 10.3.1 also brings better code testing capabilities and will help companies comply with new regulations, such as the EU’s Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA).
Rocket Software added support for the browser-based development environment VS Code last fall with the launch of Rocket DevOps version 10.2.2. Customers will find the new release of Rocket DevOps improves on that initial VS Code support, says Puneet Kohli, the president of the Rocket’s Application Modernization Business …
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What Degree? Kisco’s RCL Fellowship Spotlights Value of Training, Hard Work
April 22, 2024 Alex Woodie
Having a college degree is certainly one path to having a career in IT. But it’s not the only one, a point that Kisco Systems president Justin Loeber is making with the latest round of the Richard C. Loeber Fellowship, which is now accepting applications.
It’s not that Justin Loeber is adamantly opposed to college degrees. After all, the current Kisco Systems owner eventually received a diploma in environmental science and public policy, which he called “a passion play.”
But his father, Rich Loeber, never got a college degree. Despite proving his worth in data processing at a railroad and …
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Visualizing the Business Apps Used In the IBM i Marketplace
April 10, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops run an incredibly diverse array of software, including open source programs, packaged applications, and homegrown software. When it comes to business applications, data from the last nine State of IBM i Marketplace Surveys from Fortra helps to tell the tale.
The IBM i platform was born to run applications. It’s right there in the original name, after all: Application System/400. Software vendors flocked to support the AS/400 following its launch in 1988, and while there has been some attrition over the years, there remains a strong core of vendors developing and supporting applications running on the platform. …
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Avatier Bolsters Self-Service Password Reset with MFA
April 10, 2024 Alex Woodie
Self-service password reset cuts both ways. On one hand, users want convenient ways to reset passwords they invariably will forget. On the other, events like the recent MGM cyberattack show that more thorough user authentication is required. The folks at identity management solution provider Avatier think they have come up with a novel way to satisfy both camps – without getting cut in the process.
You might not have heard about Avatier, but the Pleasanton, California, has been quietly serving the single sign-on (SSO) and identity management needs of IBM i shops for the past 24 years. It’s integrated …
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ZendHQ Now Runs Fully on IBM i
April 10, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops running the ZendPHP distribution of the open source programming language and runtime will be interested to know that Perforce Software recently added full support for IBM i with ZendHQ, the extension for ZendPHP that provides observability and orchestration functionality for PHP-based applications. Previously, IBM i shops had to run part of ZendHQ on Linux or Windows.
Perforce Software originally launched ZendHQ back in June 2022 to give ZendPHP customers more visibility and control of their increasingly complex PHP environments. ZendHQ is a superset of functionality that bundles existing tools that were originally developed for Zend Server customers, …
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Precisely Streams IBM i Data Into Amazon’s New Db2 Service
April 8, 2024 Alex Woodie
Amid the torrent of news that Amazon Web Services unveiled at its re:Invent show four months ago was RDS for Db2, a new hosted relational data service based on IBM’s database. Amazon Web Services offers the Linux, Unix, and Windows (LUW) variant of Db2, but thanks to a new connector unveiled by Precisely last week, IBM i and mainframe shops have a way to replicate their data into it.
Amazon RDS is among the cloud giant’s most popular services, and likely one of the most popular IT services ever created. According to one estimate, Amazon RDS brings in $7 billion …
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What’s Up with Open Source on IBM i?
March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie
Open source software has become a steadfast component of the IBM i stack. But what open source software are IBM i shops using today? Results from Fortra’s recent IBM i Marketplace Survey provide answers.
It may seem odd now, but open source hasn’t always been a staple of the IBM i server’s software diet. Until PHP arrived on the platform two decades ago, proprietary software was the only option for IBM i shops.
But today, IBM i shops have hundreds of open source products to choose from. Thanks to the IBM i server’s openness, just about any product that can …
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Shield Adds HMC, Security PTFs to Nagios Monitoring Solution
March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie
If you’d like to know what’s going on with your Hardware Management Console (HMC), you can do so through the updated Nagios offering from Shield Advanced Solutions. Version 2.1 of the company’s bundled AAG and NG4i offering also will automatically notify you when IBM has submitted security PTFs for the operating system or licensed products, and even download them for you.
After initially trying to use IBM’s open source Nagios software to monitor their customers’ high availability software environments, the folks at Shield Advanced Solutions took it upon themselves to develop their own Nagios distribution for the IBM i server, …
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