• Traditional IT Spending Bests Cloud Infrastructure, For Now

  April 1, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Drawing the line between what is cloudy and what is not at this point in the history of the information technology business is not a trivial thing. But that’s why the analysts at IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and others get paid the big bucks to dice and slice the market so we can get a better of what is going on.

  To hear the big public cloud providers talk, you would think that everything that companies buy to install on premises or rent from their bit barns is cloudy – which means that it is virtualized, available with metered pricing to …

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• What New Language Will IBM i Support Next?

  March 27, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The prospect of a new language coming to a platform is always reason for excitement. New languages bring new capabilities, or at least faster ways to tap into existing capabilities. The question for those living and working on the IBM i platform is what language will come next?

  RPG remains the go-to language used by the vast majority developers on the IBM i platforms. According to the 2019 survey by HelpSystems, 84 percent of coders on the box use RPG. COBOL, RPG’s partner in legacy crime, is also supported in the Rational Development for IBM i RDi, along with …

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• Trinity Guard Launches Third IBM i Product

  March 27, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Three is the magic number for Trinity Guard, the Houston, Texas-based security software company that just delivered its third security product for IBM i. TGDetect is a monitoring tool that alerts administrators of security issues, and also integrates with third-party SIEM solutions.

  Trinity Guard was founded several years by two former Micro Focus employees, Tony Perera and Pauline Ayala, who trace their roots back to the Pentasafe and NetIQ days. Perera and Ayala left Micro Focus to develop IBM i security software at Trinity Guard. The company has been slowly rewriting the old Pentasafe products, starting with TGAudit.

  TGAudit was …

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• What’s the State of Your Backup?

  March 27, 2019 Alex Woodie

  If you’re like most IT professionals, you scarcely noticed that this Sunday, March 31, is World Backup Day. But now that you do know, you’re going to immediately do all you can to ensure that your company’s most valuable asset – its data – is sufficiently protected from the powers of destruction. The next question is: What does that mean for your IBM i server?

  As anybody who has ever lost an important document, database, or set of files knows, losing stuff hurts. And the more one loses, the more it hurts. That’s why it’s so critical to ensure that …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 27

  March 27, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  I think we’re all pretty tired of being lectured about security. I mean, there can’t be anyone left who doesn’t understand the importance of protecting data from all of the virtual predators who are out to steal and exploit it. And yet, week after week, the news headlines continue to be dominated by security breaches, sometimes perpetrated by hackers and sometimes by stupidity. This week we take a look at just a few of the recent security headlines in our top stories, but we leave it to you to make sure you’re doing everything you can to protect your data …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 12

  March 27, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  So brace yourself. HIPERs, Backup and Recovery, and QMGTOOLS are all new this week, and there is this little gem of a security bulletin: Vulnerabilities CVE-2018-5407 and CVE-2018-0734 in OpenSSL affect IBM i. That second one is elegant but deadly!

  The link for this fix can be found here, and the fixes are here:

  • Release 7.2/7.3 – SI68727
  • Release 7.1 – SI68726

  And don’t forget about this security bulletin: Vulnerabilities CVE-2019-5739 and CVE-2019-5737 in Node.js that affects IBM i. The link for this vulnerability is here, and this affects IBM i 7.3, 7.2, and 7.1. For Node.jsv6, SI69165 …

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• Rebuilding The Bottom Of The Pyramid

  March 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about how Big Blue had extended the life of the Power8-based entry Power S812 Mini, announced on Valentine’s Day last year specifically to give entry IBM i shops a cheaper alternative than buying the Power S814 or Power S824. It seems to me that IBM needs to do some rejiggering of the way it bundles and prices this entry machine to get the installed base of customers using vintage hardware and operating systems to get current and stay there.

  We are under the impression that the number …

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• Five Skills You Don’t Need To Manage IBM i (And Two You Do)

  March 25, 2019 Tom Huntington

  Much has been said to debunk the myth of an IBM i skills shortage or decry it as a disappearing act. Yet, year after year, respondents to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey by HelpSystems list IBM i skills as a top concern. The results also show that organizations are addressing these concerns by adding automation, modernizing development, and getting rid of obsolete technology that breeds the dreaded word: legacy.

  But why do we on IBM i continue to carry the perception that so-called “IBM i skills” are scarce? Is it because the keywords in our job listings don’t …

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• Guru: Why A Function Was There But Could Not Be Found

  March 25, 2019 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  I am stuck on trying to create a function in RPG to use in SQL. I based it on your FMTDATE function, which I successfully installed and is working great! I have been trying to get this function working for five hours and I am at my wits’ end. Hopefully, you will notice something right away.

  –Andrew

  The message that Andrew was receiving was SQL0204 (HISFUNCT in *LIBL type *N not found). (I have replaced the name of Andrew’s function with HISFUNC.) Yet the function existed and the service program existed. There was nothing wrong with Andrew’s RPG …

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• A HATS For Many Occasions

  March 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM gives customers plenty of options when it comes to its Rational Host Access Transformation software, including several modes of operation, different runtime options, and support for different operating systems in screen modernization engagements. With last week’s launch of HATS version 9.7, the development and deployment options got even wider.

  Regardless of which downstream options a HATS customer ultimately chooses, it all starts out basically the same on the front side of the sausage machine: Customers come to HATS because they have a 5250 (or 3270 or VT100) application that they want to transform, but they don’t want to go …

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