• Another i5/OS-i Security Vulnerability Surfaces

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You have to work pretty hard to find a security vulnerability in the OS/400, i5/OS, and i operating systems, and according to a posting from computer security research and development company Secunia last week, to find the latest one, you have to look in a very unlikely place: the system modem. According to a Secunia advisory published last week, a security vulnerability in an operating system module with the name BrSmRcvAndCheck, which can apparently be exploited to cause a buffer overflow when running diagnostics on the modem port. Secunia rated this as a “less critical” patch when it issued

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• There’s Still Money in Operating Systems, But Disruptions Loom

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Before the Internet, the operating system was your computing environment, and even though machines might be networked, the operating system on your desktop and the servers it was connected to were not just the dominant way you did computing, but the way you thought about computing. The advent of the Internet, the World Wide Web HTML abstraction layer, and various scripting languages has, as Netscape correctly foresaw when it went public more than a decade ago, changed not only the way we do computing, but also the way we think about computing. So you might be thinking, the operating system

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• SPEC Members Start on Energy Benchmark for Web Servers

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There’s an old adage: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. As most data center managers and server and storage arrays makers have been well aware of for years, we have some pretty serious power and cooling issues affecting IT operations. (As I write this, the 95-degree temperatures in New York City have me worrying about keeping IT Jungle’s Linux-Windows cluster cool once again drives the point on home.) While we have many different benchmarks for determining performance of computers, there are few workloads that have been tweaked to provide a standard means of gauging power draw while benchmarks

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• Enterprises Are Judged by the Measure of IT Performance

  June 16, 2008 Dan Burger

  Some planning and problem solving can go a long way toward better IT management and performance management. Of course, that’s much easier said than done. However, getting it done becomes much easier with the help of organizations like the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), which consists of the information technology professionals responsible for planning, measuring, and managing the performance of the world’s largest IT infrastructures. Effectively managing performance requires a focus on specific activities and a plan that can handle problems if and when they occur. Presenting information and techniques that can be applied to managing IT capacity and quality of

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• Keeping 5250 Alive

  June 11, 2008 Tom Van Looy

  Some time ago, we had problems with Client Access sessions being reset. It seemed that these connections were traveling over a VPN that got disconnected after being idle for a while. Because we were not in charge of the VPN, I used TCP keepalive as a workaround for this problem. Keepalive A TCP connection can set the SO_KEEPALIVE option with the setsockopts() system call. When the TCP connection is idle for a specified period of time, a keepalive packet will be sent to keep the connection open. (In practice, this keepalive packet is a request for acknowledgement of the previous

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• Seeking Advice on REXX

  June 11, 2008 Hey Bruce

  I want to call from CL program a REXX program, where the REXX program returns a calculate of date (yymmdd). Do you have an example you could send me? Thanks in advance, –Larry Larry, REXX can’t directly return a value to CL the way other languages do. You’d have to have your REXX procedure write the data to a file or use the REXX External Data Queue. To use a file you’d have to first override STDOUT to a file of your choice, then use “SAY” to write the data. In your REXX procedure you could do this: 'OVRDBF FILE(STDOUT)

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• Admin Alert: All About the System i Attention Light

  June 11, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  In this week’s article, I’m presenting a high-level overview of the Power i, System i, and the iSeries system attention indicator light, which is activated when the system detects a problem. While it may be mundane to concentrate on how the system alerts you when something goes wrong, this information can come in handy when that little amber light blinks on and you’re not sure what to do. Where Is the System Attention Light? You can generally find the system attention indicator light (SA light) on the System Unit panel near the green power light, although the location varies by

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• Bank’s Approach to Biometric Authentication a ‘Valid’ One

  June 10, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Keeping unauthorized users out of its core banking systems and complying with industry regulations are top priorities for the International Bank of Miami. One way to satisfy these requirements is to implement a strong password enforcement system. However, with users already inundated with passwords, the bank decided to try another strong security mechanism–i OS-based biometric authentication from Valid Technologies–which has streamlined the sign-on process, and cut down password reset calls to the help desk. With more than $800 million in assets, The International Bank of Miami, or TIBOM, is one of the largest independent banks in South Florida. TIBOM

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• Programmer Conveniences Added to BCD’s WebSmart ILE

  June 10, 2008 Dan Burger

  Moving RPG applications to the Web is not the aggravation some people make it out to be. The idea of this has been diminished by persistent misconceptions that hover around IBM‘s iSeries shops like mosquitoes on a summer camping trip. You want proof? Business Computer Design Int’l. WebSmart ILE has more than 2,000 organizations with implementation that include B2B, B2C, and e-Commerce sites built by programmers with RPG skills and an understanding of CGI. Those are applications that run on the native HTTP Apache Web Server. Last week, BCD released WebSmart ILE version 7, the latest version of its

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• ASNA Brings RPG to .NET Migration Software to Latest Windows IDE

  June 10, 2008 Dan Burger

  IBM iSeries and System i shops have been migrating RPG code to the Microsoft .NET environment for years. It’s not happening because it makes no sense. For a lot of organizations, it’s the right thing to do. Making it quicker and easier is why ASNA, the application development tool maker with more than 25 years experience in the AS/400 market, develops a product called Monarch. ASNA has just released a new version of Monarch, Version 4.0, with plenty of enhancements worth noting. Monarch 4.0 supports Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, which were released earlier this year.

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