• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 43

  November 1, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  Hold onto your Halloween candy, there are new cumes on IBM i 7.2 and 7.3! You are going to need some sugar. And there is a formal announcement of the new Tech Refreshes, which we announced last week. The corresponding group (SF99717 for V7R2 and SF99727 for V7R3) can now be ordered. Yeah, those numbers are correct, one off for ease of remembering.

  This week we also have:

  • New Backup and Recovery and Performance Tools groups for all three supported releases
  • New DB2 groups for 7.2 and 7.3
  • New WAS V8.0 groups for 7.2 and 7.1.

  Also, keep an eye …

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• IBM Wheels And Deals For Power Linux, But Where Is IBM i?

  October 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The whole point of the convergence of the RS/6000 and the AS/400 families of systems – including pSeries and iSeries and System p and System i – was not only to get a common, converged hardware platform that made IBM’s life easier, but to also – or so we have always believed – give a consistent deal to customers using AIX or OS/400-i5/OS-IBM i.

  “A foolish consistency is,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “the hobgoblin of little minds.” While that may be true, a smart consistency is the Spider-Man of great minds. Or at least those that think alike. …

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• Navigator For IBM i On A Zigzag Journey

  October 30, 2017 Dan Burger

  Navigator for IBM i provides system administrators with tools that prevent them from losing their marbles, or at least delaying that outcome until the boss mentions that grounds maintenance and window washing have been added to the list of sys admin responsibilities.

  Navigator continues to receive updates and enhancements, mostly based on filling in holes in the features and functionality that the product it replaced already possessed. IBM also takes requests from current users, which also find their way into future enhancement. But for the unskilled user trying to climb the learning curve, Navigator can be a frustrating stumble from …

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• Guru: Logging SQL Errors And Warnings

  October 30, 2017 Birgitta Hauser

  If something goes wrong with an embedded SQL statement or an SQL routine (a trigger, stored procedure or user-defined function), the system does not crash. Instead, DB2 returns a negative SQL code and an SQL state that starts with something other than 00, 01, or 02. If the routine does not handle the error, the program continues to run.

  It is good practice to log errors to a table, especially unexpected ones. Before you can log any errors, you need to know how an SQL error can be trapped and handled. You need to know how to write a condition …

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• IT Horror Stories

  October 30, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Let’s face it: IT can be downright scary. From unpatched servers and failed ERP implementations to clueless CIOs and that clown in the server room, information technology is a business fraught with danger. Here are a few IT tales that could keep you up at night.

  Are hackers lurking in your system? It’s more likely if you haven’t kept up on your patches. That’s the horrific lesson learned by Equifax, which recently disclosed that it lost sensitive data for 143 million consumers after bad guys worked their way into the system through a vulnerability in some open source middleware that …

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• More Power7 And Power8 Features To Bite The Rust

  October 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems catalog just keeps getting skinnier as the Power9 systems launch in early 2018 keeps getting closer. Ironically, as IBM pulls the plug on older Power Systems machines and their features, it is a good indication that Big Blue really is preparing the way for Power9. It is also a way to get customers who have no intention of spending on Power9 iron to buy something on their older gear before the features go away.

  I saw a new abbreviation in announcement letter 917-177, which came out on October 24, and that was LTB – short for …

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• LTO Consortium Pushes Roadmap To Gen 12

  October 25, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Hot on the heels of the release of final LTO-8 specifications and the first LTO-8 drives from IBM, the LTO Consortium revealed plans to push the tape technology out to a 12th generation. By the time LTO-12 ships, ostensibly in the mid-to-late 2020s, a single cartridge should be able to store nearly half a petabyte of data, according to the group.

  Last week, the LTO Consortium, which is composed of IBM, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and Quantum, announced that it has pushed the LTO Ultrium roadmap out two more generations. It was the first major addition since the …

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• BVS Tool Generates PayPal Invoices From IBM i

  October 25, 2017 Alex Woodie

  A new product from BVS Tools lets organizations generate PayPal invoices from their IBM i screens with just a few clicks of the keyboard. The product, called GreenTools for PayPal (G4PP), has the potential to save customers a lot of time compared to manually creating invoices in the PayPal environment.

  Use of PayPal is growing quickly as consumers look for alternative ways to buy things, particularly from their mobile phones. According to Statista, about one third of U.S. retailers accept payments through PayPal, and another 21 percent are expected to add PayPal support soon. The electronic payment network, which was …

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• Cloud-Based Digital Signature Service Arrives

  October 25, 2017 Dan Burger

  The widespread adoption of e-commerce and its benefit of improved workflow has led to the increased use of electronic signature capture. Return on investment (ROI) from shortening transaction times has grabbed the attention of businesses in many industries. Legal and security concerns — addressed by legislation such as the ESIGN Act and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act — have eased the minds of many who were wary when electronic signature capture was new.

  Power i4 Solution, a small, Connecticut-based custom software company with the majority of its business in the rental equipment field, has followed the e-signature orientation by …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 25

  October 25, 2017 Dan Burger

  IBM is one of the tech industry’s leading companies when it comes to moving jobs overseas. Low salaries, not the availability of a technically superior workforce, is the reason. Certainly, IBM is not the only company with this strategic initiative. It’s a sign of the profound change sweeping across many U.S. industries. Read more about this in the Rochester Post Bulletin editorial. A link is in this week’s Monitor.

  Jobs are not only being shipped overseas, but many of them that remain here are changing considerably. CIOs are seeing and feeling the effects of disruptive technology. Jobs are being …

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