• Log4j Security Hole Found In OmniFind Text Search Server

  March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Who would have thought that a logging utility written in Java and available for more than two decades could cause so much trouble? But that is the nature of the Log4j security vulnerability, which has been installed in all kinds of systems software and which had a Log4Shell vulnerability that was discovered by Chinese computing giant Alibaba on November 24 last year and that was revealed to the world on December 9 as a zero-day vulnerability.

  There are several areas of the IBM i software stack that use the Log4j logging utility, which is one of the many Apache open …

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• IBM i Salaries: Underpaid, Yet Highly Valued And Hard To Replace

  March 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a funny old world. In many cases, the applications that are running on the IBM i platforms of the world are trapped in a kind of time warp and so are the people who created and who maintain them. This is the only plausible explanation for the fact that salaries in the IBM i real world also seem to be in a time warp. And here we are riding up a huge wave of inflation, in something of a war footing thanks to COVID and the war in Ukraine, and it is not yet clear to any of …

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• IBM i High Availability: A Met Need?

  March 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Data from the IBM i Marketplace Survey suggests an interesting phenomenon may be playing out when it comes to high availability and disaster recovery: As the usage of HA solutions goes up, the percentage of users expressing concerns about HA and DR goes down.

  After peaking at 66 percent in HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2020, the percentage of IBM i users declaring high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) a concern has dropped each of the past two years. For the 2022 survey, which was released last month, only 59 percent of survey participants declared HA/DR to be a …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 1 – Object Authority Check And Batch Job Performance

  March 7, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  Batch processes are perennial in virtually all kinds of business processing. From time to time, customers have to deal with batch runs that take too long, and many factors influence run time. One such factor in IBM i is how you assign object authority access rights for user profiles to the libraries and objects that are accessed by batch jobs. The importance of this factor can be found in the following case study.

  Many years ago, a customer asked me to determine why batch run time took too long. The customer ran 25 concurrent batch jobs in the batch process …

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• The Low-Down On IBM’s Power Systems Sales

  March 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Late last year, IBM, under the new regime of Arvind Krishna and in the wake of the acquisition of Red Hat and the spinout of the Kyndryl managed services business, reorganized its businesses and the financial reports it gives to Wall Street investors. Generally speaking, the way Big Blue is talking about itself, from a financial perspective, is more accurate than the reorganization it did after Ginny Rometty had been at the IBM helm for a bit. Which is good. But the one downside is that we lost visibility into the Power Systems platform.

  We lamented this when looking at …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 10

  March 7, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  This week, there are a bunch of security bulletins about yet more new vulnerabilities, this time in the HTTP Server and the Samba Windows file server clone that are embedded in the IBM i operating system. There is also a partial mitigation against Log4j/Log4Shell vulnerabilities, and you may get a laugh or a cry out of this one. Maybe both. OK, probably both. Let’s go through them all.

  First, there is Security Bulletin: IBM HTTP Server (powered by Apache) for i is vulnerable to CVE-2021-44224, which you can read about here at this link. With this vulnerability, the Apache …

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• April Fools, Or Not: IBM Raises Power Systems Prices

  February 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In an inflationary environment with all kinds of parts shortages, it is no surprise when IT suppliers raise their list prices and/or cut back on the depth of their discounts as they negotiate deals. We are certainly in that kind of environment, and we are also on the cusp of new Power10-based entry and midrange server announcements from IBM as well.

  Given all of this, we expected Big Blue to be announcing some price increases on older Power9 iron, which might be in short supply and therefore might be subject to “opportunistic pricing” as too much demand is chasing too …

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• Maxava Monitor Mi8 And The Cloud Fuels Expansion

  February 28, 2022 Ash Giddings

  Let’s face it – IBM i used to be an island. Set adrift from other platforms due to its loveable quirkiness and frequently managed by a separate team. It was often considered a real outlier. In recent years IBM has worked tirelessly to make IBM i running on Power Systems feel part of the mainstream server ensemble and is now thought by many as a normal server while managing to maintain what had previously made it unique.

  As a result, IBM i is now much more likely to be managed alongside other infrastructure than ever before. The green screen only …

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• Guru: Would You Rather See a Fire Marshal or a Fire Fighter?

  February 28, 2022 Bruce Bading

  While there are similarities between the two, a fire marshal has a preventive role and focus on preventing fire, whereas a fire fighter has a reactive role and focuses on the putting out the smoldering ruins.

  When it comes to your firm’s cybersecurity practices, would you consider yourselves to be proactive or reactive (Fire Marshal or Fire Fighter)? The biggest difference between the two is your level of vulnerability when an attack does happen.

  There are ongoing practices that you can do to reduce your risk. One thing that we recommend is included in every proactive cybersecurity strategy is a …

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• As I See It: A Second Life

  February 28, 2022 Victor Rozek

  These days it’s not unusual for high school students to be computer savvy to a degree their parents could only dream of. But that wasn’t the case in 1972 when Jay Brandt attended high school.

  Oregon-based Benson Polytechnic High was conceived as a trade school, but over time adopted a pre-engineering curriculum. There, students could build a rudimentary foundation in a technology that would shortly transform the world. Jay quickly mastered the Four Horsemen of ancient IT: Basic, Fortran, COBOL, and Assembler; and when school broke for the summer, he had a novel idea.

  Although the high school had a …

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