TFH Volume: 36 Issue: 28 Archives

Inside The Encryption Key Management Changes In IBM i 7.6

August 10, 2026 Alex Woodie

IBM is making significant changes to how it handles encryption keys with IBM i 7.6. The big news is that IBM i shops now have bring-your-own-key (BYOK) support via IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud offering, which scratches a certain regulatory itch. But IBM has also bolstered how it handles master keys and save/restore keys stored on the IBM i server, which boosts security, but also makes IPLs following DR events more complicated.

Let’s start with the new bring-your-own-key (BYOK) support for IBM i in IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud offering. IBM Key Protect is a cloud-based key management …
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FalconStor Moved To The Blue Lagoon, And Is Poised For Growth Because Of It

August 10, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Way back in the Dot Com boom, when FalconStor was founded, it was one of the early innovators of what we have come to know as software-defined storage and software-defined networking as well as disaggregated storage. These terms were not even coined until a decade after FalconStor was doing it in its first product, called IPStor, which is the foundation of the various products that the company still sells today.

Like many companies, including IBM itself, FalconStor had some self-imposed business issues and financial challenges over the years – IBM in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, FalconStor in …
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Guru: Claude’s SQL Tip

August 10, 2026 Ted Holt

Today’s tip comes to us from Claude, as in the AI chatbot created by Anthropic. I don’t need to introduce him. Many readers of this august publication are far better acquainted with him than I am. I have heard reports of IBM i programmers who have quit writing source code, telling Claude to write it for them. Some folks seem to be right proud of that fact. Furthermore, I’m told that some places no longer allow humans to write source code.

I had a few ideas in mind for this article and was weighing the merits of each one when …
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Astera Makes Extracting Legacy Report Data an AI Specialty

August 10, 2026 Alex Woodie

For all that large language models (LLMs) are really good at – and they are great at a few things – understanding large reports generated by IBM i servers and System Z mainframes is not one of them. A Southern California company called Astera has identified this gap and developed its own AI-based tool for extracting information from this valuable resource.

Foundation AI models and LLMs are probabilistic systems, and they work best in the gray zones: Inputting words and images, and outputting other words and images that are similar to the originals that it was trained on but not …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 27

August 10, 2026 Doug Bidwell

Welcome to this week. You have some issues with IBM i Access Client Services to deal with as well as a new security bulletin.

Let’s start with the ACS updates, which are rolled up into ACS 1.1.9.14 and which you can read more about at this link. All prior versions are vulnerable to:
- Arbitrary code execution on Windows when installed for all users due to publicly writeable directory and configuration file.
- Injection of rogue certificate authority due to publicly writeable truststore.
- Zip slip path traversal exploit when importing a configuration.
- Versions 1.1.8.3 through 1.1.9.13 are vulnerable to downloading unverified
…
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Inside The Encryption Key Management Changes In IBM i 7.6

FalconStor Moved To The Blue Lagoon, And Is Poised For Growth Because Of It

Guru: Claude’s SQL Tip

Astera Makes Extracting Legacy Report Data an AI Specialty

IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 27

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