• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 24

  June 12, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  It is one of those quiet weeks in PTF Land, which probably means next week or the week after won’t be if history is any guide. This week, we have Security Bulletin: Multiple Vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK affect IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty due to April 2023 CPU. More information is available here. Below are the affected products and versions.

  Affected Product(s)				Version(s)
  IBM WebSphere Application Server		9.0
  IBM WebSphere Application Server		8.5
  IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty	Continuous delivery
  

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we …

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• IBM i Delivers Sizable Benefits, Forrester Consulting Reports

  June 7, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have firsthand knowledge of the positive characteristics of the platform relative to industry-standard X86 servers. We often hear anecdotes about the platform and share them with you through these pages. But IBM would like to get beyond mere anecdotes and get to some hard numbers on the IBM i advantage. That’s when it turns to Forrester Consulting.

  According to Forrester Consulting’s latest Total Economic Impact (TEI) report, a typical IBM i customer can expect to save about $2.6 million over three years as a result of the IBM i platform’s uptime, productivity, and efficiency. The report, …

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• SBOMs Will Come to IBM i, Eventually

  June 7, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The Biden Administration’s push to make software bills of material (SBOMs) mandatory may not be moving ahead as quickly as hoped. But the SBOM requirement is still marching ahead for federal agencies and the vendors who supply them with software – running on IBM i or any other platform – with a major self-attestation deadline.

  The federal government’s SBOM push began back in 2018, when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA), an agency within the Department of Commerce, spearheaded SBOM work with private-sector partners in an attempt to get better visibility into security vulnerabilities.

  The SBOM movement got a …

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• IBM i Backup Provider Storagepipe Snapped Up By Thrive

  June 7, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Storagepipe, a Toronto, Ontario-based provider of backup and recovery services for IBM i and other platforms, has been acquired by Thrive, a Massachusetts-based outsourcing company that provides a range of cloud-based IT services.

  Storagepipe has been backing up IBM i servers since it was founded back in 2001. Back in 2015, the last time we checked in with them, the company was utilizing an appliance-based approach to backing up IBM i servers, and any other Windows or Linux servers that customers wanted backed up.

  The backup would be pushed to the Storagepipe appliance, which would then replicate the backup off-site …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 7

  June 7, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  Artificial intelligence is getting a bad rap these days, and IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna isn’t happy about it. In fact, he says the recent reporting that quoted him as saying that IBM could replace 7,800 workers with AI software was incorrect, and his comments were taken out of context. Of course, that doesn’t explain why IBM recently paused hiring for “replaceable” roles. You can read more about what Krishna is saying about AI now in our Top Story below. Our Calendar is continuing to grow so be sure to check in about the latest learning opportunities.

  Top Stories From Around

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 23

  June 7, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  It’s a little more quiet in this issue of the IBM i PTF Guide than it was last time, which is a good thing and which ran on Monday. We will start off with two more security vulnerabilities, one with Rational Developer for i and the other for the WebSphere Application Server Liberty edition.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM Rational Developer for i is vulnerable to attacker obtaining sensitive information due to Java string processing in IBM Toolbox for Java (CVE-2022-43928), which you can find out more about here. Here are the affected releases:

  Affected Product(s)				Version(s)
  IBM 

  …

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• Power10 Boosts NVM-Express Flash Performance

  June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are always on the lookout for any performance tests that show the benefits of adding flash storage to Power Systems iron, and we found some recently in an NVM-Express flash drive deep drive given by Douglas Gibb’s the I/O product manager for the Power Systems line at IBM during the POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver.

  The presentation that Gibbs gave went through all of the ins and outs of flash storage on Power Systems, including those that use the NVM-Express protocol over the PCI-Express peripheral bus, which offers a direct link between the operating system and the flash storage …

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• Fortra Completes Postmortem Of GoAnywhere Vulnerability

  June 5, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Security firm Fortra recently published an analysis of the zero-day vulnerability that impacted its GoAnywhere MFT customers earlier this year and committed itself to “continuous improvement.” Meanwhile, an analysis shows that dozens of organizations continue to run unpatched and exposed versions of GoAnywhere months after the flaw was discovered and patches became available.

  Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) first became aware of the remote code injection exploit vulnerability in its GoAnywhere managed file transfer (MFT) product on January 30, as we previously reported, and quietly alerted customers on February 1. The company says it immediately shut down the hosted version of …

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• Guru: Binding Directory Entries

  June 5, 2023 Bob Cozzi

  I assume you’ve heard about *BNDDIR (Binding Directory) objects introduced circa 1994 with OS/400 V3R2. The infamous QC2LE binding directory is used by a huge number of RPG applications to access C runtime and unblocked MI functions such as system cvthc, cpybytes, and matmatr. You have probably seen RPG IV source code with the BNDDIR(‘QC2LE’) keyword on the header specification.

  I was one of the first developers outside of IBM to use Binding Directories for my own code. When I go back and look at my own RPG IV code created prior to mid-2007, well over 90 percent of it …

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• How Does Your Infrastructure Spending Stack Up To The World?

  June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As IT analysts, as well as IT journalists, we believe that the economic questions of how many widgets consumed, how much revenue and profit do they generate, and how fast are markets changing and evolving as new widgets come and old widgets go are just as important as the feeds, speeds, slots, and watts of any particular widgetry.

  That is why we have always looked at both sets of IT data over time, to get a 3-D feel for the market and its flows of hardware, software, and services across workloads. It is very rare when one of the market …

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