• New Web Console Debuts with i5/OS V6R1

  February 5, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Move over, System i Navigator. IBM has a new graphical console for configuring, planning, and managing the System i operating environment with the release of i5/OS V6R1. The new Web console, called IBM Systems Director Navigator for i5/OS, is based on IBM’s System Director family of products, and carries the promise of allowing administrators to manage System i servers using the same tool they use to manage Windows, Linux, and Unix servers. OK, let’s get one thing straight: Systems Director Navigator for i5/OS isn’t replacing System i Navigator. At least not yet, anyway. Administrators, operators, and capacity planners working with

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• RPG to .NET Reduces Maintenance Pain, Adds Rich User Interface

  February 5, 2008 Dan Burger

  Like driving with the parking brake on, some business applications put the skids on productivity. Steve Stenglein, the IT director at United States Warranty, could feel the drag that green-screen applications were causing. He’s a big fan of the IBM System i and a skillful RPG programmer, but his staff is small and their time is tightly budgeted. Aging applications required a lot of maintenance and replacing green screens with a graphical user interface was a priority. He knew modernizing apps would not be easy. Most would agree that the most difficult, most time consuming, and most expensive way to

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• IBM Makes DB2 Web Query More Affordable

  February 5, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week modified the licensing terms for DB2 Web Query for System i, a move that should make the new Web-based query and report writing tool more affordable for some users. By introducing a new run-time user license, customers won’t have to buy expensive named-user licenses for people who are just accessing reports and not creating them. While System i users have applauded the capabilities of the new DB2 Web Query product–especially as it compares to the limitations of the old green-screen Query/400 offering–some users have expressed misgivings. Specifically, they’re concerned that the new DB2 Web Query offering is

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• Bug Busters’ HA Offering Gets Role Swap Function

  February 5, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Users of Bug Busters Software Engineering‘s high availability software for i5/OS will find it easier to switch from the production to the backup machine thanks to a new role swap feature the company has added. The role swap commands, among other new features, were added to Remote Software Facility-High Availability (RSF-HA) release 8.2, which is due to ship this quarter. For the last couple of years, Bug Busters has been adding high availability features to RSF, which was originally developed as a way for System i shops and software vendors to distribute patches and other chunks of data among

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• Security Vulnerability Reported in i5/OS

  February 5, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM on Saturday reported that it has discovered a security vulnerability in i5/OS V5R3 and V5R4 that could lead to cross-site scripting attacks. The flaw, which is in i5/OS’s HTTP Server, is deemed low risk by outside security experts, and has not been fixed yet. According to IBM’s Authorized Program Analysis Report, or APAR, the security vulnerability is caused by an input validation error in the HTTP Server. When the HTTP Server receives an unsupported “Expect” header field value, it sends back an error document that includes the Expect header field value. Instead of “HTML-escaping” the field header value

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• IBM Unveils Pricing and Packaging for DataMirror HA Software

  February 5, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week made its first software announcement for iCluster, the collection of high availability software obtained with its acquisition of DataMirror last year. The company will sell a full version of iCluster to large customers with complicated and high-transaction environments, and will sell a scaled-down version called iCluster SMB to small and mid size businesses. When IBM acquired DataMirror last summer for $161 million, it obtained two main product lines, including the iCluster HA software, and Transformation Server, a data replication tool that supports all major database management systems. It was generally accepted at the time that IBM was

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• V6R1 to Bring New OmniFind Text Search Server

  February 5, 2008 Alex Woodie

  One of the new goodies IBM is introducing with i5/OS V6R1 is OmniFind Text Search Server for DB2 for i5/OS. With this new offering, IBM is allowing users to conduct full-text searches across documents stored in their DB2 for i5/OS database (sometimes called DB2/400). In other words, if you want to find every single document containing the phrase “Bob likes ice cream” stored on your System i server, OmniFind Text Search Server is the product for you. OmniFind is IBM’s enterprise search offering for helping organizations index and subsequently find specific pieces of information stored across corporate intranets, the Internet,

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• ICS Updates FormSprint with GUI Design Tool

  February 5, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Integrated Custom Software (ICS) recently launched a new release of FormsPrint, its electronic document management software for i5/OS. With FormSprint version 200801, the company is now enabling customers to design their new forms in a graphical environment. FormSprint is a document management offering that handles a range of document-related needs for System i shops, including merging form-overlays with spool file data, generating MICR and barcodes, and distribution of documents (through hooks into Computer Keyes e-mail and fax products). With FormSprint version 200801, users no longer must use the coordinates-based approach to designing forms. Instead, with the new PC Designer, customers

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• Disk Dangers Avoided with Robot/SPACE 3.0

  February 5, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Help/Systems last week launched a new version of Robot/SPACE, a utility designed to spot potential problems with System i disk usage before they escalate into full-blown crises. With version 3, the company has expanded the areas that Robot/SPACE analyzes for potential danger. There are few certainties in life. But aside from death and taxes, you can feel pretty confident that your data storage needs will never go down. On the contrary, adding more storage–usually in the form of disk–is about as close to a certainty as paying Uncle Sam and the Grim Reaper their due. While the rest of the

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• LTO-5 On Course for 2009

  February 5, 2008 Alex Woodie

  The new Linear Tape Open (LTO) Generation 5 tape drive specification is progressing well, and is on its way to being solidified, the companies behind the LTO program–IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Quantum–announced recently. Since it was first released at the beginning of the decade, the LTO tape specification has come to dominate the market for midrange tape drives. Momentum really picked up in late 2005, when drives based on the LTO-3 spec, which offers 400 GB capacity and 80 MB per second (MBps) data transfer speeds (double that with compression), were delivered. About a year ago, the

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