• IBM Kills iAccess for Windows, Older RDi Versions

  April 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Spring is still weeks away in the Upper Midwest, where it still feels like winter. But that didn’t stop the IBM i leadership in Rochester, Minnesota from embarking upon some spring cleaning by sending out to pasture some development tooling and admin interfaces for IBM i, including older releases of RDi and all of iAccess for Windows.

  IBM yesterday announced that effective April 30, 2019, it will withdraw IBM i Access for Windows. That announcement puts the final nail in the coffin of the old Windows-based client that traces its roots back to OpsNav.

  Here’s the short announcement posted to …

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• GDPR Data Discovery On Tap from Raz-Lee

  April 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  With less than six weeks to go before the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect, it’s crunch time for remediation. For IBM i shops that aren’t sure where sensitive data resides in their databases, a power tool from Raz-Lee Security can provide some automated relief.

  The GDPR represents a dramatic overhaul of the privacy laws governing what companies can do with data about European citizens. Backed by the central European Union government, the GDPR provides sweeping new rules that require any organization storing data about EU citizens to obtain consent for that data, to ensure that it’s protected, …

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• ‘Air Gap’ Your Data with Tape, LTO Group Says

  April 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Here’s one more reason why tape’s demise has been prematurely recorded: Tape helps to protect data by providing an “air gap” between live production systems and protected data. That’s according to a new report sponsored by the LTO group. In other news, IBM made an LTO announcement that’s pertinent to IBM i shops.

  In a new white paper issued last week, IDC raised the specter of tape-based storage systems providing an air gap that is actively thwarting attempts by cybercriminals to compromise production systems, in those that would otherwise be vulnerable to ransomware attacks.

  “Recently, tape has shown itself to …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 18

  April 18, 2018 Dan Burger

  Who runs the world? This week in Monitor we see a trend in stories from the web featuring female leadership. IBM is no newb to promoting women to leadership positions (do we really need to make the Ginni Rometty reference here?), and this week CNBC takes a closer look at IBM’s female-helmed blockchain team, which is unusual in the male-dominated space.

  IBM’s first chief privacy officer also speaks with AdWeek this week about the changes in corporate privacy over the last 20 years.

  Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

  (CNBC) Blockchain is a hot trend in tech, and the fact …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 15

  April 18, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Hello fellow residents of IBM i Land. (You know that know man is an iLand, right? Anyway . . . .) In this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, the Java group was updated on all releases. Now that HTTP Admin is converting to JDK 8, if you are running Java applications – and who isn’t running Java applications these days at least some of the time – this is worth checking out.

  See the following in the IBM i PTF Guide:

  • V7R3 SF99725
  • V7R2 SF99716
  • V7R1 SF99572

  Another warning: IBM i Access for Web, product …

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• The Platform Matters More Than Ever, The Operating System Less So

  April 16, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those of us who have been in the IBM midrange for three or four decades are so used to thinking about systems and application platforms for so long it is hard to remember that this sort of thinking is fairly new to the rest of the IT community that did not grow up on proprietary mainframes or midrange gear. Platforms matter more than ever and continue to evolve, but that core operating system – the basic kernel that runs on a processor and has some management features on it – is changing very slowly.

  This is not a bad thing. …

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• IBM Patches Samba Vulnerabilities In IBM i

  April 16, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue has issued two patches for serious flaws in IBM i’s implementation of Samba, flaws that could result in an attacker launching a denial of service attack or changing user’s passwords. The company patched IBM i 7.2 and 7.3, as support for IBM i 7.1 wanes.

  On April 3, IBM published a security bulletin informing users of the existence of two flaws in IBM i, as well as the existence of two program temporary fixes (PTFs) to patch the problems. Both of the flaws involve Samba, a free and open source implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol to provide interoperability …

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• Guru: RDi and Refactoring

  April 16, 2018 Ted Holt

  When I first heard the term refactoring, I thought, “So that’s what they call it.” I had been refactoring for years, my only tools being SEU and a compiler listing. I learned a long time ago that refactoring is often necessary to enhance code, especially poorly written code. Another reason I often refactor is to better understand poor code.

  To refactor means to rewrite source code without changing its external behavior. Due to all the “legacy” source code (RPG II, RPG III, fixed-form RPG IV, OCL, etc.) in IBM i shops, the ability to refactor source code is a …

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• As I See It: The Curse Of The Clever

  April 16, 2018 Victor Rozek

  By all accounts, Neville Chamberlain was a clever man. Clever enough to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. But it turned out he was also stunningly naïve, signing the Munich Agreement granting Germany the right to annex the Czech Sudetenland in return for a promise of peace, thus emboldening one of history’s great monsters, Adolf Hitler.

  The consequences of extreme cleverness and dangerous naiveté play out across the entire spectrum of human interactions, but are perhaps most visible in politics and business. The pursuit of power and money invites troves of uber-clever people who all too soon become enamored …

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• Tesla Teases IBM i Software Vendor Into Some Experimental Coding

  April 16, 2018 Dan Burger

  First of all, let me assure you this is not Car & Driver. You’re going to hear about a car and a driver, but the resemblance stops there. The driver is Alex Roytman and the car is a Tesla Model 3. I’d describe the car as a “cross-over” because it appeals to driving enthusiasts and technology geeks. I’d describe Roytman as an enthusiast, more so in the second category than the first.

  Loyal IT Jungle readers are familiar with Roytman because he’s the CEO of Profound Logic, an IBM i modernization company specializing in Web and mobile application …

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