• All i Want For Christmas Is RDi Lite

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  All some IBM i community members wanted for the holidays was RDi Lite. Instead, they’re looking at IBM like the Grinch due to its decision not to offer a free, scaled-down version of the application development tool. What’s more, the community is expressing great displeasure at the manner in which IBM handled the matter through its Request for Enhancement (RFE) process.

  Hassan Farooqi kicked off the campaign for RDi Lite in August 2017, when he posted an RFE on the new IBM developerWorks website that’s designed to facilitate collaboration with its user communities by allowing them to submit ideas for …

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• Open Source Is the Future, So Where Does IBM i Fit In?

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server reached a milestone this year when it turned 30 years old, an amazing feat for a remarkable system that continues to provide computational value to tens of thousands of organizations around the world. But another birthday was celebrated this year that the IBM i community should take note of: The 20th anniversary of the beginning of the open source movement.

  Now, this birthday is a little bit questionable because open source software existed before 1998, of course. But the time is worth marking because an important meeting took place in Palo Alto, California, where the phrase …

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• Happy Holidays From IT Jungle

  December 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  And now we come, once again, to the holiday season here at IT Jungle. This coming year, which we are already planning for, we enter the 30th year of publishing news, tech tips, strategy, and tactics concerning the AS/400 and its progeny. It has been such an education for all of us, and a privilege and an honor to serve the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i communities all those years, as well as those many shops who hung back in the early years on the System/36 and System/38 platforms while we are thinking about it.

  We are …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, December 12

  December 12, 2018 Jenny Thomas

  This issue is officially our last of 2018. The end of a year is a time for reflection for many, and also a time for lists. Lists of the people who and things that stood out during the past 12 months. For the IT Jungle team, our year was defined by the loss our beloved Dan Burger. The three of us left behind remember him every day, and it would be remiss not to mention him here. Dan’s voice is missed not just in Monitor and The Four Hundred, but in our community. So as we recap this …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 49

  December 12, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Well, there is not much going on this week in IBM i PTF Land. There are no new groups, just a bunch of security vulnerabilities. To be precise, there is a Security Bulletin: Vulnerabilities CVE-2018-5407 and CVE-2018-0734 in OpenSSL that affect IBM i.

  The PTFs to fix these vulnerabilities are:

  • Release 7.2 and 7.3: SI68727
  • Release 7.1: SI68726

  For further information, check out this link.

  New Links this week: Sorry, nothing new here, either. Ho, Ho, Ho!

  The Guide at a glance: There are no new defectives this week (12/08), going for a new record! Here is the defective …

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• For Entry IBM Shops, Power9 Is About Performance And Security

  December 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Buying new systems costs money, often a lot of money relative to the size of the overall IT budget and the revenue and profit streams of the companies for which they work and, in essence, actually embody what that company really is. So in a sense, systems are always worth the money if they are actually letting people do their work properly.

  That said, there is always an argument to be made for doing an upgrade – often actually a migration because the system itself cannot easily or economically be upgraded – and another set of arguments for waiting a …

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• An IBM i Year In Review

  December 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Another year is just about wrapped up for us here at IT Jungle. That means it’s time to ease off the news pedal just a tad and enter into a retrospective mood, with the hope of gaining some perspective on where we’ve been in 2018 and perhaps how we’ll start off 2019.

  It all started off rather poorly, way back in. . .

  January

  . . . when the big news was about Spectre and Meltdown, the two vulnerabilities that brought everybody rudely back to the real world following the New Year’s celebration. Nearly all types of processors, including …

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• Guru: Addressing A Legitimate Question

  December 10, 2018 Ted Holt

  This is the last Monday issue of The Four Hundred for 2018. My, how time flies! I like to do something different at year end. In previous years I have solved Sudoku puzzles, found my way through mazes, solved the peg game, and more. This year I wish to honor a request that has come from various people and to address what they consider to be a legitimate question.

  As I wrote recently, the question I hear occasionally goes something like this: “Why bother with service programs? Why not use dynamic calls?” Rather than insult the …

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• As I See It: Digital Digs

  December 10, 2018 Victor Rozek

  My father once bought a house in San Francisco for $15K and change. By any measure it was a modest home, three bedrooms, one bath, 1,300 square feet, located in a lower-middle class district in the Upper Mission. Working class blue-collar families lived there, and our neighborhood was chockfull of diversity long before that word became both fashionable and divisive. Just on our block we had German, Mexican, Italian, Polish, and Chinese families. Kids played in the streets, and at dinnertime front doors opened and mothers called for their children in thickly accented English.

  One of the unique characteristics of …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Hat In Hand

  December 10, 2018 Hesh Wiener

  IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat is for Ginni Rometty as vital and significant as Lou Gerstner’s development of IBM’s services business in the 1990s. If IBM can properly integrate Red Hat, IBM’s legacy businesses and strategic initiatives will all be reinvigorated. This is not merely desirable, but absolutely necessary. Without the Red Hat acquisition, IBM is threatened with advancing torpidity and imminent decline. For IBM right now, it is Red Hat do or die.

  Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux operating system already contributes to the viability of IBM’s server offerings. But when an IBM hardware customer, let’s say a mainframe shop, …

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