• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 22

  June 9, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  We are playing a little catch up after the Memorial Day holiday here in IBM i PTF Land. It was fairly quiet over the holiday weekend, with a set of PTF updates for the Hardware Management Console. To be specific, take a look at PTFs MH01889 and MH01890, which are an interim fix, or ifix as IBM calls them, for HMC V9 R2 M951 running on virtualized X86 or Power servers, respectively. See this link for more information.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • DB2 Web Query for i V2.2.1
  • Content

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• Forrester Consulting Weighs Costs, Benefits of IBM i

  June 7, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i supporters often cite the low cost of ownership, integrate nature, and self-management features of the platform as key advantages over competing systems. To try to put some actual data behind those assertions, IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting, which recently presented its findings in a report titled “The Total Economic Impact of IBM i.”

  To get an understanding of the IBM i server’s unique financial characteristics, Forrester Consulting, which is an offshoot of the main tech analyst firm called Forrester Research based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, interviewed four current users of the system. It collected data about the relative costs and …

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• Taking A Centralized Approach To IBM i Security

  June 7, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are branching out and doing new things here at IT Jungle, and one of them is using video as well as text to get information about the IBM i platform across. Video is certainly not a new thing, and we have done a bit of it as part of consulting engagements, but starting now it is going to be part of what we do on an ongoing basis. We are grateful to IBM i security and high availability software vendor Precisely for initially supporting us in this endeavor.

  For our first video interview, we sat down with John Vanderwall, …

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• Guru: The Essential Workers Of IT, And Lessons Learned From Trying Times

  June 7, 2021 Rob McNelly

  Over the past year we’ve all heard about essential workers. Essential workers are present in our industry as well. Those who manage and maintain our power grids and technology infrastructures have always played a vital role. It’s easy to overlook these professionals, but they shouldn’t be taken for granted. In 2020, their mostly unnoticed efforts were particularly important.

  Don’t get me wrong; I’m not necessarily putting IT workers on the same level as healthcare workers or first responders. My point is simply that during the pandemic, we were reminded that some aspects of our jobs can only be accomplished by …

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• As I See It: The Reluctant Return

  June 7, 2021 Victor Rozek

  Another day, another questionable announcement from the CDC. This time it was a guideline suggesting that vaccinated people need not wear masks in most circumstances; a pronouncement that many experts found to be both ill-advised and premature.

  Nonetheless, many heard it as an invitation to return to normalcy. Long-suffering restaurant and bar owners exhaled for the first time in many months, and everyone seemed delighted just to see the bottom half of their friends’ faces again.

  One group in particular was unabashedly eager to return to the pre-pandemic past: CEOs. Newsweek reported on a poll conducted by the Best Practice …

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• Get Virtually Packed For Common Europe Power Summer Camp

  June 7, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The world is still not in the swing of things when it comes to business travel, trade shows, and conferences, and in many ways that is a good thing because events that were not physically accessible to many of us are now virtually accessible. Provided that you can deal with some time zone changes from time to time.

  Such is the case with Common Europe’s Power Summer Camp 2021 Virtual Edition, which is running live on the Internet June 14, 15, and 17. No, that is not a typo, the event is skipping a day on June 16, perhaps to …

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• Modern Tools For A Modern IBM i

  May 26, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops may be in for a rude awakening when they suddenly realize their applications are not keeping up with the times. How can these IBM i shops get on the right track in the modernization department? A trio of IBMers offered some tips.

  Brad Bentley, Tim Rowe, and Kris Whitney took to the virtual airwaves last week to present “IBM Tools for Modernizing Your IBM i Applications,” a one-hour webinar from IBM. Application modernization is an extremely broad topic, as the 266-page IBM Redbook of the (almost) same name will attest to, so they obviously didn’t cover …

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• Malware Threats and Cyber-Recovery on IBM i

  May 26, 2021 Brian Barth

  Cyber threats have evolved from the traditional vectors of theft and direct attacks to more financial driven cyber destruction and extortion, especially via ransomware. Hospitals, manufacturers, universities and financial institutions have all been attacked in the last year, and the rate of attacks is increasing as networks become more accessible to support remote workers. The Colonial Pipeline attack has demonstrated that even the critical infrastructure that supports our supply chains is not invulnerable.

  In 2021, more than three quarters of attacks are financially motivated, and over half of those attacks are ransomware – an attack in which files are typically …

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• Keeping Up With Open Source Security Updates

  May 26, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Open source is a source of technological innovation on IBM i, in multiple respects. But it also opens the platform up to additional security vulnerabilities. That’s why it’s important to stay on top of security patches, for the core operating system as well as the open source technologies that are helping to transform it.

  IBM does a good job of keeping up with security vulnerabilities are found in the operating system as well as the multitude of open source technologies that are included with it. In the last five weeks, IBM has issued several security bulletins for core open source …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, May 26

  May 26, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  In yet another sign of a return toward normal, whatever that will be post-pandemic, COMMON held its NAViGATE conference and exhibition this week, welcoming attendees virtually — as well as live and in person — to learning sessions and an expo. Continue to follow IT Jungle for news coming out of NAViGATE as we all look forward to seeing what our IBM i ecosystem has in store as businesses begin to reopen and start the work of moving beyond the challenges of adapting to COVID-19. The current news of the week is a hodgepodge of topics, which is a nice …

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