• The Plus Things Change, The Plus Things Stay The Same

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like nearly all of you, I have never read the autobiographical romance novels of Jean-Baptise Alphonse Karr, or read back issues of the satirical Le Figaro newspaper that were nearly two centuries old when Karr was editor of that paper, which is today aimed at the upper middle class and which is still one of the papers of record for France.

  But like nearly all of you, I am very familiar with one of the witticisms that came out of Karr’s pen: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Which translates into American as something akin to: …

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• Db2 Web Query Customers Left In The Lurch

  October 23, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The sudden collapse of the OEM agreement between IBM and TIBCO for Db2 Web Query has left users of the product in a difficult position. Where will they get technical support, updates, and fixes? Should they abandon the software? Can they sue somebody if something happens to their systems?

  These are some of the questions that IBM i shops who adopted Db2 Web Query are asking themselves in the wake of IBM’s stunning October 10 announcement to kill off the product. Effectively immediately, IBM stopped marketing and selling the IBM i product, which was an OEM version of Information …

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• Why Big Blue Is Simplifying The IBM i LPP Stack

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If only the paranoid survive, as legendary Intel co-founder Andy Grove once quipped, then we all would pretty much have to be paranoid pretty much all the time. And this, obviously, would not be healthy. But as legendary founder of The Four Hundred, the irreplaceable and irascible Hesh Wiener, once quipped, sometimes they really are out to get you.

  And so, we come to IBM’s recent “come to Bezos” moment starting late last year that it was going to be providing subscription pricing for hardware and systems software for the IBM i platform running on Power Systems. We fully …

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• So You Wanna Take Another IBM i Survey, Right?

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to believe that it has been a decade since the IBM i Marketplace Survey was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, now known as Fortra.

  As you might imagine, we miss Dan every day, and we are committed to the mission that he had to better understand what is going on in the IBM i base. Time is running out for you to participate and have your voice heard and your IBM i shop is counted. Please take a moment and take the survey, which you can do …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 43

  October 23, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Busy, busy, busy. That is what the good people at IBM Rochester have been in the past week, with a slew of PTFs for the currently supported releases – that is IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.4 that are on standard support and IBM i 7.3 that just went into extended support at the end of September, a trio of security vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack, and two group PTFs for the IBM i 7.2 release that is supposed to be kaput.

  Let’s start with the security vulnerabilities.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is vulnerable to …

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• What the Latest ALL400s Survey Tells Us About the IBM i Community

  October 18, 2023 Alex Woodie

  What is the most popular development tool in the IBM i community? What technology exists in nearly every shop? What BI tools are in use? And what activities are sitting in the IT backlog’s of IBM i shops? These are some of the questions that ALL400s answered with the latest edition of its IBM i community survey.

  You may have heard about ALL400s as the comprehensive list of IBM i customers around the world. John Rockwell, the Florida man behind ALL400s, does his best to keep the list as updated as possible.

  In addition to the list, Rockwell has put …

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• Everybody Needs Monitoring On The IBM i

  October 18, 2023 Chris Hird

  If you are running a software business, you can never go wrong by listening to the customer and then providing what they want.

  Our journey into being an adjunct for the open source Nagios system monitoring tool began when we had a client that wanted to monitor multiple LPAR instances being backed up by our high availability software, HA4i, from a single pane of glass. At the time, we had a PHP interface for our HA4i tool, and we really did not want to rewrite all of that just to be able to give this customer that single pane …

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• How Are You Doing, And What Are You Doing?

  October 18, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i Marketplace Survey is still open, and it is time for you to take a moment and let us know what is going on in your IBM i shop.

  The annual survey, which is in its tenth year now, and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey, are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly true since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other IT market researchers and consultancies have long since stopped tracking Power Systems in any kind of detail and certainly don’t spend a lot of …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 18

  October 18, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer seems obvious. “One bite at a time.” The point being that you can’t complete a very large job or solve a very complex problem all at once, but you solve it by accomplishing one small task at a time and sticking with it until it is completed. The elephant in the room these days is application modernization. Many of you are tackling it within your organizations in many different ways, just like we report on it from many different angles. We start this week’s Top Stories with a quick opinion piece on …

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• What the Fall ’23 TRs Bring Navigator for i

  October 18, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The releases of IBM i that ship next month will bring enhancements to Navigator for i, the Web-based interface for accessing, monitoring, and managing IBM i. However, without some functions that have yet to arrive, the transition from the legacy Navigator tool will take more time.

  It’s hard to believe, but the new Navigator for i offering is only two years old. You will recall that the introduction of New Nav, as IBM called it, was the biggest news with the launch of IBM i TR 7.3 TR11 and 7.4 TR5 in the fall of 2021. Not only was the …

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