• Is Authority Collection The Right Thing For IBM i Security?

  August 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

  In the past two releases of IBM i, Big Blue has added new security capabilities in the form of the authority collection that allow administrators to see exactly what authorities users need to use their applications. While some welcome authority collection as helping to tighten the security of IBM i applications, others in the IBM i community wonder if the new information is helping at all.

  Authority collection debuted in 2016 with the launch of IBM i version 7.3. When the feature is activated, it monitors what authorities (such as ALLOBJ, SECADM, and so forth) are being called as users …

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• Guru: RDi Code Coverage Without SEPs

  August 12, 2019 Susan Gantner

  My last Guru tip provided an introduction to RDi’s Code Coverage tool that you can use to determine how complete your tests are. In that tip I discussed how to run it using Service Entry Points (SEPs). In this follow-on tip, I’ll continue the exploration of this tool with some additional details plus introduce you to an alternative way to run a Code Coverage session.

  Before going into the alternative approach to running Code Coverage, there are a few details I didn’t mention in the first tip.

  I mentioned that Code Coverage uses the debug engine. What I didn’t mention …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 12

  August 12, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  It often seems like there aren’t any new ideas any more. Instead, newer versions of old ideas come back around every few decades (1980s fashion is one current example), or in the case of our first featured article this week, every few hundred centuries or so. For instance, the Trojan Horse was likely the inspiration for the most recent method of breaking into data, another idea that isn’t new but is a simple twist that can result in a frightening outcome for IT managers. You can read about “warshipping” as well as get a little taste of the IT news …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 31

  August 12, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Here’s what’s new with PTFs for the IBM i platform here in the summer of 2019.  There are new HIPER PTFs for IBM i 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4 as well as a new Java Group for IBM i 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4. IBM has also released SF99675, which is a stack of Hardware and Related PTFs for IBM i 7.4. MGTOOLS is new for IBM i 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4, and finally MQ for IBM i V7.1.0/V8.0.0/V9.0.0 are updated for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3.

  Here are the New and Updated Links in the IBM i PTF Guide this …

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• Stacking Up IBM i And Windows In The Clouds

  August 5, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  So how does the IBM Cloud running IBM i stack up against the main competition in the midrange, which is on premises Windows Server plus SQL Server from Microsoft as well as that same stack running in the Amazon Web Services cloud? We can’t give you a definitive answer, but we can give you some food for thought as you ponder how good of a deal Big Blue is giving customers who want to put IBM i on the cloud.

  Making comparisons between on premises iron and cloudy infrastructure is difficult and problematic. The good thing about a public cloud …

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• Midrange Dynamics Speeds Table Updates In Db2 Mirror Clusters

  August 5, 2019 Alex Woodie

  With the launch of Db2 Mirror with IBM i 7.4 in June, IBM heralded the age of continuous availability on the midrange platform, bringing IBM i up to par with Windows and Linux platforms. However, while the new software keeps production data in perfect synch, it’s not so great at keeping up with changes to underlying database tables. That’s an area that Midrange Dynamics is addressing with its change management software.

  With Db2 Mirror, IBM has essentially extended a single-server database implementation into a clustered database with two active nodes. As soon as a piece of data is created, updated, …

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• Guru: Passing Parameters To Python

  August 5, 2019 Mike Larsen

  Python scripts offer great benefits to developers, whether used standalone or in conjunction with RPG programs. As I’ve been exploring Python and recently I had a need to execute a Python script from an RPG program. In addition to executing the script, I also wanted to pass it parameters.

  One of the benefits of passing parameters is to give us the ability to soft-code programs or scripts. Soft-coding makes programs more flexible and re-usable, and helps to reduce maintenance.

  To illustrate how to do this, I’ve coded a very simple RPG program and an even simpler Python script. I’ll start …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 5

  August 5, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  The temperatures are still rising outside but summer is winding down, especially for those of us with school age kids who know their carefree days will soon be replaced with reading, writing, and arithmetic. In the IT world, this is the time of year when we start to get our second wind. The fall conference season is just around the corner, and solution providers are looking to do a last push, and we are ramping up to make sure we keep you in the loop for all of it. In the meantime, enjoy the last few weeks for summer and …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 30

  August 5, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  It is definitely summer in IBM i PTF Land. There are a few things to report this week, but not the deluge it has been in prior weeks. There are updates to the Backup and Recovery Group for IBM i 7.4, 7.3 and 7.2, and the SAP 7.1 Final update. There is also a new MGTOOLS for all of the current releases.

  As for tips, August 1 was National Water Balloon Day, and we did not know there was such a thing. But it is the first Friday every August. Go figure. We will be going through new and updated …

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• Power Systems Keeps Growing Against A Tough Compare

  July 22, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This time last year, Big Blue was just starting to ship Power9-based systems for the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and that gave the Power Systems line a revenue bump through the third and fourth quarters of last year. There is no such big deal this year, although IBM has sold a baby version of these machines – if you consider the 25 petaflops “Pangea III” supercomputer small – to European oil and gas giant Total.

  That deal with Total surely helped IBM make its …

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