• In The API World, Nobody Knows You Are An IBM i

  August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

  Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. …

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• RDi On Mac Users Are In For A Big Sur-prise

  August 2, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who run Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) on macOS are running into trouble getting the IDE to run on the latest release of macOS Big Sur, version 11.5. However, with patience and perseverance, IBM i developers are finding ways to get it to run. An official fix from IBM has yet to be made.

  Reports of problems getting RDi 9.6 to run on Big Sur emerged in June, when users began to post reports on IBM i chat boards, including the new IBM Community site. Users reported problems installing RDi on Big Sur, as well as …

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• Guru: Elapsed Time For Human Beings

  August 2, 2021 Ted Holt

  Quick! Think of a weird animal! Perhaps you thought of the platypus, a duck-billed mammal that lays eggs. Maybe Dr. Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu jumped to mind. Maybe you thought of a politician or a musician or your next-door neighbor. I know a weird animal that you probably didn’t think of.

  The weird animal I have in mind is called the duration. This animal is found in SQL queries. There are three species: timestamp, date, and time. Today I write about the challenges of interacting with this strange entity. I’ll use the timestamp duration as an example. Interacting with date …

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• No More Shouting The Name “Power” (Well, Except In Our Title Here)

  August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The marketing people at IBM have been at work again, apparently, and it looks like there will be some subtle branding changes coming with the launch of Power10-based servers later this year, very likely by September or maybe October.

  One of my pet peeves about the IT industry is that vendors sometimes feel compelled to shout their company names or product brands when it is completely unnecessary. They seem to choose a brand and then work backwards to come up with some abbreviation that they think is clever. It’s when they overreach that it gets annoying, and language is my …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 31

  August 2, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  In this edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, we want to remind you once again that when you go to Fix Central at IBM to download PTFs to patch your IBM i operating systems and related systems software, you must use an encrypted variant of FTP to do so – that’s FTPS or SFTP, depending – as of July 10. If you follow all of the links starting with the Fix Central homepage, you will eventually get to this link right here, which tells you how to configure SFTP on your machine. We interpret this to mean that …

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• One IBM i Shop’s Close Call With Ransomware

  July 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Think the ransomware epidemic won’t affect you, that it’s somebody else’s problem? After reading this story about one IBM i shop’s recent experience with cybercriminals, it may have you thinking twice about your approach to security.

  Greg is the IT manager at a midsize distribution company located in the South. IT Jungle is abiding by his request to keep his last name and the name of his company out of this article. But Greg was determined to share his story with the wider IBM i community, in the hopes that it will spur them to take the ransomware threat seriously, …

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• The Three Challenges To Securing Your IBM i Platform

  July 28, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever you have to tackle a complex problem, it is best to break it down and then figure out a way to take on the most important and impactful issues first. And when it comes to securing the IBM i platform, nobody knows better than Carol Woodbury, president and chief technology officer at DXR Security, about how to take this “securable” system and lock it down.

  Woodbury spent 16 years at IBM from 1984 through 2000, rising to become security team leader for the AS/400 platform and eventually becoming chief engineering manager for security for the platform. After leaving Big …

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• IBM i Support Added To IBM Spectrum Protect Backup Software

  July 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  At long last, IBM has added IBM i support to Spectrum Protect, its enterprise backup product. After numerous requests for IBM i support, IBM quietly made the change in November by presenting Spectrum Protect as an S3-compatible storage repository, which is supported on the IBM i via the Cloud Storage Solutions for i (5733-ICC) offering, IBM product managers said recently.

  For many years, IBM supported IBM i with Tivoli Storage Manager, the flagship enterprise backup offering that eventually was renamed IBM Spectrum Protect. However, IBM let the IBM i support lapse, an event that was noticed by many IBM i …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 28

  July 28, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  It’s been a minute since out last issue of Monitor. Hopefully many of you have been able to enjoy a little summer fun (as we did here in the Jungle) but it’s time to hunker back down as we look forward to a busy fall season. So let’s get down to business. While we use this forum to share relevant and interesting news and events from around the computing world, this week we’d like to point you to a fascinating story of our own. In our Top Story below, editor Alex Woodie talks with an IBM shop that recently survived …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 30

  July 28, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Back on May 8, we told you that Access Client Services 1.1.8.7 was being replaced by ACS 1.1.8.8 because of a bug in its code. On May 15, in the following week’s issue, we apologized because what we heard through our channels turned out to not be true. Today, we found the following document, which we are adding to the IBM i PTF Guide, which is dated May 4 and provides three different workarounds for the issue that we thought was going to compel IBM to upgrade to ACS 1.1.8.8.

  Anyway, of the three workarounds recommended for the …

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