• Four Hundred Monitor, June 1

  June 1, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  Our coverage from POWERUp 22 continues this week as we suddenly find ourselves in June and looking forward to the second half of the year. So far, so good, as the saying goes, in terms of getting back to normal in the world of the IBM i. These days, everyone’s “normal” probably looks a little different, but to us here in the Jungle, seeing the rash of new announcements, in-person tradeshows, and general level of enthusiasm on the rise around our i ecosystem is a happy normal for us. Take a look below to read all about the news of …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 22

  June 1, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Well, there is a lot of stuff going on with IBM i PTFs this week, with cumulative patch rollups, or Cumes as we call them, Technology Refreshes, and other goodies. Specifically, IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.2 have Cume rollups, as well as their respective TR6 and TR12 updates of new functionality.

  There are also two new security vulnerabilities. First, there is Security Bulletin: IBM Navigator for i is vulnerable to an SQL injection (CVE-2022-22495), which you can read about at this link. The patches for this vulnerability are as follows:

  IBM i Release	HTTP Server for i 

  … Read more

• POWERUp Brings IBM i Base Back Together in the Big Easy

  May 25, 2022 Alex Woodie

  After two years of lockdowns and Zoom calls, IBM i professionals were joyful to be face to face with fellow users this week at the POWERUp conference in New Orleans. The celebration lasted all week, and spilled over onto Bourbon Street at times, but that didn’t get in the way of the primary mission: Getting educated on IBM i. And with the latest enhancements, there was a lot to learn.

  For many POWERUp 2022 attendees and ISVs, COMMON’s annual conference is the first physical event they’ve attended since the pandemic started back in March 2020. With the easing of …

  Read more

• New Nav for i Brings New Stuff to You

  May 25, 2022 Alex Woodie

  With the recent launch of IBM i 7.5, IBM added several compelling new features to “New Nav,” the new version of IBM Navigator for i that debuted less than a year ago. Among the goodies that all you IBM i admins out there will get are support for the audit journal, integration with Content Manager OnDemand for i, and updates to Performance Data Investigator, among other additions.

  IBM launched a remake of IBM Navigator for i with last September’s Technology Refresh for 7.3 and 7.4. The company rewrote Navigator from the ground up in Angular, a JavaScript framework for building …

  Read more

• Why Infor’s IDF Is Important for Customer Innovation

  May 25, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Among the remaining large ERP vendors targeting IBM i, Infor appears to be the most committed to ongoing development on the platform. A key element of that strategy is the Infor Development Framework (IDF), which plays a big role in extending the functionality in its IBM i-based ERP systems to meet customers’ specific needs.

  The IDF features most prominently in Infor’s long-term strategy for the ERP XA (MAPICS), ERP LX (BPCS), and ERP System 21 product lines, says Robert Russel, the vice president of product development at Infor.

  “We’re starting to try to essentially get that technology embedded into …

  Read more

• Four Hundred Monitor, May 25

  May 25, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  It’s an exciting week in the Jungle as COMMON’s POWERUp 2022 wraps up and the reporting begins. Our own Alex Woodie was on the show floor, and he will be bringing us all of the latest releases, news, and announcements in the coming weeks. So we have to kick off this week’s Monitor by re-directing you back to the Top Story directly from the Big Easy, but this is only the beginning of the coverage you can expect from Alex, who was busy attending sessions, meeting with vendors, and finding out what’s in store for the IBM i.

  Top Stories

  … Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 21

  May 25, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Not to give you any work to do, but I am going to give you some work to do. There is a new service pack for system firmware level MH1010, and this service pack, which you can read about here, addresses a HIPER issue. Next, compression with the ZLIB algorithm with Geographic Mirroring synchronization is coming soon! You can find out more about it at this link. And finally, check out the infrastructure changes that are coming to IBM Electronic Fix Distribution / IBM Fix Central system, which might necessitate customer firewall and proxy setting changes, which you …

  Read more

• How Committed Is Big Blue To The IBM Cloud?

  May 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Before you get all nervous, I did not ask how committed is Big Blue to the Power Virtual Server. So don’t jump to the wrong conclusion. But we are beginning to wonder just how committed IBM is to the idea of operating a globe-spanning X86 server cloud that competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu Cloud.

  What got us to thinking about this was an announcement by IBM that it has signed a “strategic collaborative agreement” with AWS, which is just facing the facts that AWS is the …

  Read more

• Immutable Copies Are Only As Good As Your Validation

  May 23, 2022 Stan Wilkins

  A system can always be replaced, but the files and objects that comprise the application and the data that makes it useful can fall victim to all sorts of decay, neglect, or abuse in a modern system. And that is why we did backups to tape subsystems, or even tape libraries and then virtual tape libraries based on disk drives for so many years. And for those who cannot afford to have downtime or lost data, the IBM i base has been fortunate to have some of the best high availability clustering ever invented.

  With ransomware and malware attacks on …

  Read more

• Guru: IBM i *USRPRF Security

  May 23, 2022 Bruce Bading

  IBM i has long enjoyed a reputation of being one of the most securable application servers in the industry. IBM i object encapsulation or object-oriented architecture achieves a level of technology integrity not found in file-based systems such as Unix, Linux, and Windows – as long as QSECUTY is set to 40 or 50.

  This advanced technology however does not exclude the IBM i from security risks if your development teams are not practicing (DevSecOps | CSRC (nist.gov)) and (Zero Trust Architecture | NIST).

  Let me remind what one of the lead signatories on the Agile …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles