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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Modernize Your Apps, Leapfrog The Competition
April 23, 2018 Alex Woodie
The IBM i server has a well-deserved reputation for reliability and low cost. It also has a reputation for not being the most agile and cutting-edge platform on the market (which is also well-deserved). However, thanks to innovative modernization techniques, IBM i shops can get the benefits of innovation and perhaps leapfrog competitors who wasted resources buying middling tech along the way.
City Furniture faced this predicament recently. The South Florida chain of furniture stores wanted to extend into the showroom the same type of experience that customers first encountered while perusing the company’s website. The company figured that putting …
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IBM Kills iAccess for Windows, Older RDi Versions
April 18, 2018 Alex Woodie
Spring is still weeks away in the Upper Midwest, where it still feels like winter. But that didn’t stop the IBM i leadership in Rochester, Minnesota from embarking upon some spring cleaning by sending out to pasture some development tooling and admin interfaces for IBM i, including older releases of RDi and all of iAccess for Windows.
IBM yesterday announced that effective April 30, 2019, it will withdraw IBM i Access for Windows. That announcement puts the final nail in the coffin of the old Windows-based client that traces its roots back to OpsNav.
Here’s the short announcement posted to …
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GDPR Data Discovery On Tap from Raz-Lee
April 18, 2018 Alex Woodie
With less than six weeks to go before the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect, it’s crunch time for remediation. For IBM i shops that aren’t sure where sensitive data resides in their databases, a power tool from Raz-Lee Security can provide some automated relief.
The GDPR represents a dramatic overhaul of the privacy laws governing what companies can do with data about European citizens. Backed by the central European Union government, the GDPR provides sweeping new rules that require any organization storing data about EU citizens to obtain consent for that data, to ensure that it’s protected, …
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‘Air Gap’ Your Data with Tape, LTO Group Says
April 18, 2018 Alex Woodie
Here’s one more reason why tape’s demise has been prematurely recorded: Tape helps to protect data by providing an “air gap” between live production systems and protected data. That’s according to a new report sponsored by the LTO group. In other news, IBM made an LTO announcement that’s pertinent to IBM i shops.
In a new white paper issued last week, IDC raised the specter of tape-based storage systems providing an air gap that is actively thwarting attempts by cybercriminals to compromise production systems, in those that would otherwise be vulnerable to ransomware attacks.
“Recently, tape has shown itself to …
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IBM Patches Samba Vulnerabilities In IBM i
April 16, 2018 Alex Woodie
Big Blue has issued two patches for serious flaws in IBM i’s implementation of Samba, flaws that could result in an attacker launching a denial of service attack or changing user’s passwords. The company patched IBM i 7.2 and 7.3, as support for IBM i 7.1 wanes.
On April 3, IBM published a security bulletin informing users of the existence of two flaws in IBM i, as well as the existence of two program temporary fixes (PTFs) to patch the problems. Both of the flaws involve Samba, a free and open source implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol to provide interoperability …
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Profound Rolls Out Node.js Development Services
April 11, 2018 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that want to get into Node.js development but lack the technical know-how to work with the language may be interested in a new professional service unveiled by Profound Logic last month in which the company will do the actual development work for you.
Node.js has become one of the most popular development languages for a variety of reasons, including the way it unifies JavaScript for back-end and front-end work, the modular nature of Node.js apps, and the overall agility it gives to developers, particularly those building real-time apps that need to run across multiple platforms. The fact …
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Jack Henry Banking On De Novos Surge
April 11, 2018 Alex Woodie
The future of computing might be headed to clouds, blockchain, and analytics everywhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of big iron. In fact, banking software developer Jack Henry & Associates reports that sales of its flagship IBM i-based SilverLake software are going strong, particularly among de novo banks in the past year.
Jack Henry has a solid reputation for developing banking software used by midsized banks and credit unions. The Missouri company has more than 9,000 customers, including a fair number that use SilverLake, which is considered a best-in-class banking platform.
In recent months, Jack Henry has been …
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Human Error Driving Data Breaches, Studies Find
April 11, 2018 Alex Woodie
Preventable errors – including clicking on malicious links sent as part of a phishing attack and misconfiguring servers and network devices – account for a large number of data breaches, according to a pair of studies released last week by IBM and Baker Hostetler.
In IBM‘s annual X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2018, the company concluded that “inadvertent insiders” — or employees who unwittingly cause security incidents through negligent actions – accounted for two-thirds of all the records that were comprised in 2017. IBM says nearly 3 billion records were compromised last year, which is actually down from the 4 …
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COMMON Changes Things Up With PowerUp 2018
April 9, 2018 Alex Woodie
We are six weeks away from the first inaugural PowerUp conference, the new name that COMMON has given to its annual meeting and exposition. While the new name has drawn some feedback, the changes that COMMON is making to the conference itself are expected to be the big head turners next month in San Antonio. We check in with the user group’s president, Justin Porter, for the good news.
Let’s start with PowerUp, a name that not only reflects COMMON‘s affiliation with IBM and its Power Systems servers, but also reflects the notion of “up skilling,” the activity most …
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Shield Takes Another Stab At Multi Node In HA4i
April 4, 2018 Alex Woodie
Shield Advanced Solutions is putting the finishing touches on a new version of its HA4i high availability software that can replicate data across multiple nodes. The product, which has the working name HA4i Multi-Node, will allow customers to adopt more complex data replication flows, such as one-to-many and many-to-one, which puts it on a more solid footing with other HA products.
IBM i shops have been steadily adopting high availability software over the past few years, studies such as HelpSystems‘ annual IBM i Marketplace Survey and Vision Solutions‘ State of Resilience show. We’re now at a point where …
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