• Assessing The Ransomware Threat On IBM i

  April 10, 2017 Alex Woodie

  How would you like to be given the choice of paying a $200,000 ransom or having your server down for a month? Those are real outcomes from two recent ransomware attacks on IBM i servers, which cybercriminals may be starting to target.

  “We certainly have seen a trend recently in malware and specifically ransomware, just based on the fact that now people have figured out how to monetize infecting your server,” says Robin Tatam, director of security technologies for HelpSystems and its PowerTech subsidiary. “There’s certainly an increased prevalence of that.”

  Windows malware, in particular, poses a serious threat to …

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• Printing Investments In The Digital Age

  April 5, 2017 Dan Burger

  How does a company that’s invested in AFP and IPDS printing processes modernize to keep pace with increasing demand? There are certainly options. Some are better than others, with strengths varying depending on the ultimate goals. Some are more expensive than others, and that depends on whether the comparison is strictly upfront costs or considers total cost of ownership.

  For many companies, print volumes are increasing and weak performance becomes a hot button issue. Slow printer speeds, limited printer availability, and perhaps the worst of all, printer downtime, all need to be addressed. But don’t overlook workflow processes, management of …

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• Speedy PHP 7 Now Available for IBM i

  April 5, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The fast new PHP language and runtime that Zend Technologies has been working on for two years is now available for IBM i. With the delivery of PHP 7.1 and Zend Server for i 9.1 yesterday, the company says IBM i shops can expect to see their PHP applications run anywhere from 50 to 200 percent faster than before. IBM i shops will also benefit from MariaDB support and a new clustering capability.

  The introduction of PHP 7 last fall marked a major overhaul of the popular scripting language that runs on all major platforms. As the first major release …

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• Vanguard Goes Mobile With Content Management

  April 5, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Vanguard Systems last week debuted eMobile, a new mobile app that allows users to interact with its enterprise content management (ECM) system from the comfort of an iOS or Android app. As an extension to its flagship IBM i-based Vanguard ECM, eMobile keeps users hooked into the document workflow even when they’re out of the office.

  Nobody said the shift from paper-based forms to digital document management would happen overnight. Even today, in the sixth decade of mainstream business computing, paperwork that’s based on actual paper – as opposed to digital forms represented by pixels on screen – is still …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 5

  April 5, 2017 Dan Burger

  Technically, you don’t need SQL to survive. However, if you’re not using it, you should know what you are missing. Here’s a conversational introduction to SQL that can open the door to modern programming techniques that can modernize applications and databases by reducing the amount of coding and moving business logic to the database.

  This week’s Monitor also has articles about tech start-ups in unlikely places in the United States heartland, a new IBM Cloud and Red Hat Linux partnership built on OpenStack, IBM’s change of heart regarding work-at-home programs, and a piece on why people should and should not …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 13

  April 5, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  It has been a good week for fixes, people of IBM i Land. The DB2 groups were released for V7R2 and V7R3, and the Performance Tools groups are out for all three V7 releases. Another good thing is that the MG tools announced a new version, and Option 24 on its main menu adds some great functionality for assisting in the management of PTFs on your system.

  But the big news is that the Java client has a new release, V1.1.7.0, with anxiously awaited new functionality. You can download the latest base package at this link: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/i/access/solutions.html.

  As I …

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• MSPs Get Monthly IBM i Pricing; Why Not Everyone?

  April 3, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On one of the problems with cloud computing, from the point of view of the people building the clouds, is that they can provide per-user or per-hour utility style pricing to their customers for hardware and system software, but they have to pay for perpetual licenses to software and buy the hardware to provide that service. They have to get a lot of capital and shell it out before they can even begin to take in the first dollar.

  Over the past several years, IBM has offered managed service providers – really more hosting companies than true cloud capacity vendors …

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• Time To Get Your 2FA On, IBM i Admins

  April 3, 2017 Alex Woodie

  System administrators working in regulated industries will soon be required to sign-in to servers using two-factor authentication (2FA), according to the latest PCI requirement. The industry regulation will impact administrators working with all types of computer systems, and will likely be enforced in late 2017 or early 2018, security experts say.

  In prior versions of the Payment Cardholder Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), only remote administrators were required to use 2FA, which bolsters the security of the sign-on process by requiring users to show “something you know,” like a password, as well as “something you have,” like a hardware …

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• Guru: The XML Composition Conundrum of XMLNAMESPACES or XMLATTRIBUTES

  April 3, 2017 Michael Sansoterra

  Hey, Mike:

  After reading the IT Jungle Guru tips on DB2 XML Composition (see Related Stories below), I’ve been able to build XML from relational data. I have everything working but now I need to enclose all data in a “Document” tag after the XML declaration like the example here:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
  <Document xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
  xmlns="http://MyCompany.com" 
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://MyCompany.com validate.xsd">
  

  I tried using XMLNAMESPACES but can’t get it to produce the “xsi:schemaLocation” tag. How can I construct the document tag I need?

  –N.C.

   

  The problem here is that the xsi:schemaLocation in your example is not a namespace, but …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: iBird In The Hand Or iToo In The Bush

  April 3, 2017 Hesh Wiener

  IBM i shops seem to be pretty content with their systems. Profiles of the installed base, such as that recently published by HelpSystems, show a mix of old and new equipment with an impressive span of performance. For users, the stability of the base is sign that owners of the systems are satisfied. But for IBM, ISVs and other suppliers, an i that is not evolving is a dead duck. Suppliers to the IBM i market want the platform to become a phoenix, a fresh system rising from the ashes of aging predecessors.

  In the past month, we …

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