• 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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• Db2 Web Query: Way More Than Just A Query Tool

  February 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

  You might be forgiven for thinking that Db2 Web Query is just a way to run your SQL queries on IBM i from a browser. After all, “Web” and “query” are right there in the name, aren’t they? But the product’s name belies the true nature of this multi-threat analytics application, which can do a whole lot more for IBM i shops than just run queries.

  IBM’s Doug Mack tackled this reality-assumption gap during a recent webinar on Db2 Web Query, which received a bunch of new capabilities with the recent version 2.4.0 upgrade. Mack, a longtime IBMer whose …

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• IT Spending Growth Will Not Be As Robust In 2023

  February 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are like other companies in the world, your IT budget as 2023 is getting caught in the pinchers between inflation making IT hardware, software, and services more expensive and the jitteriness of the economy, both locally and globally, that is making company owners and managers a little less hesitant to spend in the first place.

  The good news, as we are fond of saying, is that an economy cannot go to zero unless there is a zombie apocalypse, a nuclear war, an electromagnetic pulse event, or an invasion by aliens. The funny thing about February 2023 is that …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 8

  February 27, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  We are playing catch up a bit here at the IBM i PTF Guide, and apologies for that but it goes that way sometime. There are a bunch of security vulnerabilities that you need to be aware of, including one that covers systems software not from IBM, as we usually track, but file transfer software from Forta (formerly known as HelpSystems). We are going to be keeping a closer eye on third party software security bulletins going forward.

  So first, we have CVE-2023-0669, which explains that GoAnywhere MFT from Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) suffers from a pre-authentication command injection …

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• IBM i Subscription Pricing Comes To All Power9 And Power10 Iron

  February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been gradually “cloudifying” the packaging and pricing of its Power Systems hardware and IBM i software stack as an alternative to buying hardware outright and acquiring perpetual licenses to the operating system and pay Software Maintenance. Subscription-based pricing came to hardware and software for the Power10-based Power S1014 server running IBM i 7.5 last year, and now IBM i subscription pricing is more widely available.

  As outlined in announcement letter 223-030 on Valentine’s Day last week, IBM i subscription pricing is now available on all Power9 and Power10 servers, top to bottom, and on the four current …

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• RPG Use “Skyrocketed” Says IBM i Marketplace Report

  February 20, 2023 Alex Woodie

  RPG has always been the number one development language on IBM i, the platform with which it is most closely linked. But as open source languages like PHP and Java spread on IBM i, some speculated that RPG’s popularity would begin to slip. That hasn’t happened, according to Fortra’s most recent IBM i Marketplace Survey Results report. In fact, usage of RPG has “skyrocketed,” it says.

  From 2015 to 2020, the percentage of Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) Marketplace Survey-takers who chose RPG as one of their development languages stayed steady, hovering around the 84 percent to 89 percent level. Structured Query …

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