• IBM Nears The End of the Road for Server Reliability Improvements

  October 21, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Reliability has always been one of the hallmarks of IBM big iron, the midrange and mainframe systems hundreds of thousands of companies run their businesses on around the world. These sturdy systems simply don’t go down very often, certainly less frequently than “industry-standard” (i.e. Intel-based) systems. In fact, the System z and Power systems are so reliable that, statistically speaking, there’s very little room for improvement.

  For data on uptime and reliability, we turn to Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC), which is led by longtime IT industry analyst Laura DiDio. ITIC has been conducting an annual server and operating system …

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• IBM Previews New Power Tech At TechXchange Event

  October 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I wish we could tell you what was up, but we don’t know what it is. But we do know that all of the top tech brass at Big Blue related to the Power Systems platform are going to be participating in the keynote address at IBM’s TechXchange 2024 event in Las Vegas – what we used to call PartnerWorld – on Tuesday.

  Like a bad AI model with not enough parameters and not enough data broken down into tokens, we have to try to infer from first principles what IBM might be announcing and therefore what we might see …

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• Guru: Web Concepts For The RPG Developer, Part 4

  October 21, 2024 Chris Ringer

  The final article in this series is about the JWT (JSON Web Token). If you wish to review the previous articles, you can drill back from part three. For unattended machine to machine (M2M) processes, a JWT string is a formatted container for requesting access to a resource server. I think of a resource server as the applications. And in our case, the JWT has an asymmetric signature.

  But really, what is a JWT? It’s similar to a temporary driver’s license. Think about your last visit to a hotel (figure 1).

  Steps:

  1. You present your ID (JWT) during check-in

  …

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• IBM Working On Making Enterprise Java Easier

  October 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Java is important in the enterprise, and getting more important, and IBM wants to help make managing and using Java easier.

  At this time last year, there were 26.3 million application developers in the world, and according to CodeNinja, about 20 million of them were reasonably fluent in JavaScript, nearly double the number six years ago. (We are not sure if CodeNinja is counting Node.js as a variant of JavaScript, as it probably should.)

  Java, a much older cross-platform language and the lingua franca of business logic in the enterprise, is not as large but is seeing a bit …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 41

  October 21, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  Don’t get hyper about HIPERs, but there are some issues you need to deal with if you have moved to IBM i 7.5. High Impact / Highly Pervasive (HIPER) Issue Potential undetected data loss can occur on LPARs using NPIV with certain Fibre Channel adapters. Potential undetected data loss can occur on LPARs using NPIV over Fibre Channel adapters with the following Feature Codes:  EN1E/EN1F, EN1G/EN1H, EN1J/EN1K, EN2L/EN2M, and EN2N/EN2P.

  You can read about this HIPER PTF at this link.

  Now, there are also two security vulnerabilities on this week’s To Do list.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM …

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• Sundry Hardware Announcements Accompany IBM i TR Updates

  October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With high-end Power10 machines coming out in September 2021 and most of the Power10 lineup coming in July 2022, we don’t expect much in the way of substantial Power10 system announcement at this point in that processor’s lifecycle. The “Bonnell” entry Power S1012 machine from this year May is, in fact, probably the last Power10 machine to come out the door until Power11 systems come out next year some time.

  But IBM is always tweaking things here and there when it comes to hardware features and bundles, and so it is with the October IBM i platform updates. We saw …

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• How To Have The Wisdom Of Experts Woven Into Your Code

  October 14, 2024 Nicholas DeLessio

  No matter how far you are down the road with your DevOps automation journey, or even if you’re not yet starting that journey, it’s probably a good idea to have a code checker; not everyone can have a Linus Torvalds review their work (as famously happens with the open source Linux kernel), but there are automation tools available for various languages and platforms that do static code analysis and they are the next best thing.

  These tools, sometimes called “code linters” (because they remove the fuzzy bits out of application logic like actual linters remove imperfections stuck to our clothing), …

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• Big Blue Bolsters Navigator For i With New Stuff

  October 14, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Changes are afoot with Navigator for i, the Web-based administrative tool for the IBM i platform, which gains a range of new capabilities with the latest Technology Refresh. Some of the more visible additions to Navigator include complete support for the Advanced Job Scheduler and expanded support for new security journal data mart. But not to be overlooked are the retirement of the old Web Admin GUI (with replacements in Navigator), and enhancements to PDI.

  Navigator for i is IBM’s strategic Web-based console for administrating the IBM i server. The product enables administrators to monitor and manage various components of …

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• Power Systems Management Stack Updated Alongside TR Updates

  October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there are Technology Refreshes for the IBM i stack and new Technology Levels for AIX, then that means IBM has also updated a slew of systems software and middleware that runs atop these stacks. This being the fall, then we knew that TRs were coming for IBM and we therefore knew that updates were coming for PowerVM, VIOS, PowerVC, Cloud Management Console, and the Hardware Management Console.

  The enhancements for these collections of software were part of the October 8 announcements, were detailed in announcement letter AD24-0630, and will be available for electronic download on December 12 this …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 40

  October 14, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  First off this week, there is a security vulnerability for you to deal with in your IBM i systems. Specifically, we have Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in MD5 Signature and Hash Algorithm affects IBM i (CVE-2015-7575), which you can read more about here. IBM i releases 6.1, 7.1. and 7.2 are supported and will be fixed as follows:

  5770-999, 5770-SS1:

  • Release 6.1.1 – MF60292
  • Release 7.1 – SI59229, MF61242, MF60291
  • Release 7.2 – SI59230, MF61243, MF60290

  5770-UME:

  • CIM 1.3: SI59244
  • CIM 1.4: SI59193

  Also, be aware of changes to data upload for IBM Support – Preparing customer firewalls and proxies …

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