• Shield Launches Message Monitoring Offering for IBM i

  August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals should stay on top of important messages generated by their server. But sometimes can be difficult for a user to sign-in on a console. With Enterprise Monitoring Solution for IBM i, or EM4i, Shield Advanced Solutions is giving operators and administrators the capability to view messages and log files remotely via email, text, or push notifications, and to respond to them, too.

  EM4i monitors IBM i message queues and job logs on behalf of the user. When a message hits the log, EM4i automatically forwards it to the user as email, text, or via Pushover Notification, …

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• Taking A Camel-First Approach to Integration

  August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Unicorns and Chupacabras may not exist on this planet, but camels certainly do. And according to midrange open source guru Jesse Gorzinski, IBM i shops would do well to take a camel-first approach to integration challenges.

  The camel, of course, is Apache Camel, the Java-based integration framework that’s designed to connect two or more systems. During the recent OCEAN TechCon21 conference, Gorzinski, IBM’s business development manager for open source on IBM i, presented a compelling overview of Camel and how it can benefit administrators and developers in an IBM i environment.

  “Apache Camel can make it pretty easy to …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 11

  August 11, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  Summer is winding down and the kids are heading back to school, but even as the seasons change, a return to normalcy is not in the forecast as the world continues to grapple with the pandemic. Hybrid working environments are becoming the norm for some as everyone does their best to adapt, which is something we also see in our Calendar below where offering options of virtual and in-person learning are becoming common. (No pun intended.) Cloud and cybersecurity continue to be hot topics on our Top Stories list and don’t look to be dropping from the news cycle anytime …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 32

  August 11, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Another day, another security vulnerability in an enterprise software stack. This one is not in an open source software package, or Windows Server, but in the Hardware Management Console, or HMC, for high-end Power Systems servers. Specifically, you need to be aware of Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in bind used by Power Hardware Management Console (HMC).(CVE-2021-25215), which you can read at this link.

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

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • IBM HTTP Server for i

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • IBM HTTP Server for i

  PTF Groups 7.2:

  • IBM HTTP Server for i

  PTF …

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• Balancing Supply And Demand For Impending Big Power10 Iron

  August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always an exciting time when Big Blue is rolling out a new processor generation – well, with the exception of the Power6+, which IBM did not really talk about at all and tried to pass off as a Power6 until I figured that out. And I have to admit, IBM used the Power6+ architectural tweak and a refinement of the 65 nanometer chip manufacturing process (as opposed to an expected 45 nanometer process shrink) to still cram two whole processors into a dual chip module to radically expanding the throughput performance per socket, and it was impressive …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Making Quick Wins Part Of Your Modernization Strategy

  August 9, 2021 Chris Koppe

  IT leaders are being asked to do way more than keep the lights on these days. For many, the recent pandemic has exposed the need for organizations to provide effective digital experiences and enable remote work. At the same time, many industries experienced revenue loss and as a result, have fewer resources.

  Understanding where to focus efforts can be key in helping you drive the best value and stay aligned with company goals. Success often lies in striking a delicate balance between addressing modernization needs and working within reduced budgets.

  The path to modernizing IBM i applications is paved with …

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• Guru: The Deception of Fractional Labeled Durations

  August 9, 2021 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  We measure certain processes in tenths of an hour. For whatever reason, we cannot make date/time arithmetic work properly when dealing with this data. There must be something that we don’t understand — what we’re doing seems simple and straightforward. Can you help?

  — One Confused Reader

  What this reader wants to do makes perfect sense. He wants to take a value like 8:00 AM, add a fractional number of hours to it, let’s say 1.1, and come up with 9:06 AM. Let’s try an example.

  declare global temporary table StampData
   ( Stamp   timestamp );
      
  insert into session.StampData 

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• Security Alert: The Anti-Alfred E. Newman Effect

  August 9, 2021 Alex Woodie

  For years, business leaders resembled Alfred E. Newman when it came to security. If “What, me worry?” wasn’t their motto, then it was something awful close. But amid a slew of high-profile cyberattacks on the nation’s infrastructure, corporate and government officials are – finally – starting to get the message.

  “The Summer of Ransomware” began in May 2021, when hackers shut down the largest gasoline pipeline on the East Coast. That attack was followed by several other high profile attacks that shut down schools, meat processing plants, and healthcare networks in the U.S. and Western Europe. There has also …

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• Sundry IBM Announcements Of Relevance To Power Shops

  August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is a particularly calm part of the Power Systems product cycle, and an unusually calm time in the IT market in general. So there ain’t a lot going on out there. But there are a few items from Big Blue that we wanted to make you aware of.

  In announcement letter 621-011, IBM is rolling out a variant of software-defined networking, called IBM Cloud Networking appropriately enough, that can be used to interconnect instances of its X86, Power, and z machinery on the IBM Cloud public cloud to each other and to other cloud services through a series …

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• In The API World, Nobody Knows You Are An IBM i

  August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

  Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. …

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