• As I See It: AI-AI-O

  March 13, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Unless you think encouraging people to eat glass is a good thing, or you happen to revel in being compared to Hitler, you probably weren’t all that impressed with the recent Big Tech AI roll out. To say it was unimpressive would be a kindness. Arguably, it was a grade A, prime time, gold-plated disaster.

  Take Meta Platform’s online tool Galactica. Please. It was quickly yanked offline when, according to The Washington Post, “users found Galactica generating authoritative-sounding text about the benefits of eating glass, written in academic language with citations.” I have to admit, the citations were …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 10

  March 13, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Here is what is new this week: Fixes. To be specific: Long Term Support release: 9.2.0.10 client install image for IBM MQ on IBM i release level: 9.2.0.10-IBM-MQC-IBM_i. IBM MQ is also known as WebSphere MQ also known as MQ Series, and it is the message queuing middleware that Big Blue has been selling since 1993. Yup, that is 30 years ago, and this tool is one of the foundations of the microservices movement. It is Kafka-esque. Or, more precisely, Kafka is MQ-esque.

  Anyway, here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last …

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• Situation Wanted

  March 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There have been a tremendous number of layoffs in the tech sector in the past several months, and we are grateful that the IBM i market is part of the economy but also somewhat set apart from the go-go tech sector that sometimes engages in irrational exuberance. But we also know there is a talent shortage and a skills gap in this IBM i market. The question is, what can we do about it?

  Well, The Four Hundred can do one simple and easy thing: We can start a Situation Wanted column, which are doing today to help get people …

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• The IBM i OS Base Is Older Than We Think, But Moving Ahead

  March 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hardware upgrades are costly in terms of money and while it is always exciting to get a new system with that “new computer smell” – and you know what we are talking about – at least IBM i operating system and systems software upgrades don’t carry such a high price – provided you are on Software Maintenance and you do proper testing on your software before you make a jump to a new release.

  The other great thing about IBM i systems software is that any given release not only runs on the current new Power Systems hardware at the …

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• Rocket Rolls Out IBM i Modernization Bundle

  March 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software last week unveiled a new collection of tools designed to help IBM i shops elevate their game across multiple IT disciplines. Dubbed the Rocket Modernization Suite for IBM i, the new bundle brings together existing Rocket offerings in the DevOps, APIs, test automation, HA/DR, terminal emulation, and Web-enablement spaces. It’s all about lowering the barrier to adopting Rocket tools and improving customer productivity when they do, the company says.

  Like other software vendors in the space, Rocket Software has accumulated somewhat of a disparate collection of tools for the IBM i server. The Massachusetts vendor started its IBM …

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• We Know Security Is A Concern, But What Is Actually Going On?

  March 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is an uncomfortable truth that security is a very high concern among IBM i shops – and consistently has polled as the most important concern for the past several years – but that concern does not always translate into dedicating more resources to security tools or the expertise of others with managed services who can help.

  It is one thing to know that security is top of mind, but it is another thing entirely to have a sense of the relative prevalence of different kinds of attacks and the actions of hackers in the wake of a successful attack. …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 6

  March 6, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  The topic of artificial intelligence has really heated up in recent weeks. ChatGPT took over the news cycle recently, and not just because it has teachers pulling their hair out as they try to contend with how to prevent students from plagiarizing essays. We’re seeing AI make headlines in our industry this week, which isn’t as surprising, but we must admit the story of a giant 3-D printer building a neighborhood in Texas did catch our attention. (You can find that one in the Top Stories below.) And another reminder to check out all that is available to you on …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 9

  March 6, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  We are still playing catch up and will be back in synch soon. We wanted to remind you about an important bug issue, which is ADMIN4 Job Terminates Suddenly When A User Profile Without *ALLOBJ and *IOSYSCFG Authority Accesses the IBM Web Administration GUI, which you can look at here.

  This issue is introduced after applying the following IBM i HTTP Group PTF levels:

  • IBM i 7.5: SF99952 level 5
  • IBM i 7.4: SF99662 level 25
  • IBM i 7.3: SF99722 level 42

  Download and apply the following 5770-SS1 PTF to prevent the ADMIN4 job from ending suddenly. The PTF …

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• The Power Systems Base Is A Little Less Rusty

  February 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Another three years, and another upgrade cycle that can bring about the modernizing of the Power Systems iron that supports the IBM i customer base. Or, more precisely, another four distinct upgrade cycles that customers are on as they move off legacy iron to something more current than what they have.

  What we mean by this is that some customers are stuck on older releases because they are cheapskates by necessity or they have applications that can only run on older releases like OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS 5.4, or IBM i 6.1. Others are stuck on IBM i 7.1. Or IBM …

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• Why Maxava High Availability?

  February 27, 2023 Ash Giddings

  Software-based logical replication for IBM i remains a popular solution for high availability and disaster recovery due to its ability to adapt over the years to changing environments like co-locations and the cloud. Maxava HA is known for its efficiency and scalability, but what else sets it apart for large enterprises worldwide?

  Negligible CPU Consumed On Production Server

  The Audit Journal (QAUDJRN) is a valuable tool for protecting the IBM i server with over 70 auditable events. However, in large environments, it can become overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of entries every minute. Some logical replication solutions heavily rely on …

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