• What Open Sourcing Power’s ISA Means For IBM i Shops

  August 26, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Due to a conflict with a prior engagement at the Hot Chips conference, where IBM unveiled some of the aspects of the impending Power9′ processor that will prototype some ideas about memory subsystems that will appear in the future Power10 chips, we were not able to attend the OpenPower Foundation’s developer summit in San Diego last week. But IBM kept us in the loop, and we were intrigued to learn that Big Blue was open sourcing the instruction set architecture, or ISA, of the Power processors.

  This step is perhaps an inevitable one, given Big Blue’s desire to make the …

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• The AS/400 Operations Evolution

  August 26, 2019 Tom Huntington

  According to a 2018 ITIC survey, 59 percent of respondents cited human error as the number one cause of unplanned downtime. In that story, the president of an IT operations and cybersecurity company observed that “the root causes of downtime are the same as they were 20 or 30 years ago. But there are more of them.”

  That got us thinking. Businesses and technologies have changed over the past few decades, but why haven’t our IT processes kept pace? Why are we still suffering from downtime as the result of human error? Sure, human error can cover all …

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• Guru: Read a Data Area As a One-Row Table with SQL, Take Two

  August 26, 2019 Ted Holt

  Fifteen years ago, reader W.G. asked me about the possibility of treating a data area as a one-row table (a physical file with one record) in an SQL query. The question intrigued me because in my System/36 days, I had often wished that I could access the local data area (LDA) as a one-record data file in a query.

  Today, thanks to Scott Forstie and his team at IBM, I update my response to W.G. with more information. It’s not that the technique I presented in 2004 is outdated — it’s as relevant as ever — but that the fine …

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• LTO-8 Tapes To Finally Ship in 4Q

  August 26, 2019 Alex Woodie

  A long-running patent dispute between Sony and Fujifilm has been settled and shipments of LTO-8 tape media will finally become generally available in the United States in the fourth quarter, the companies involved in the dispute have announced.

  While IBM and other companies have been shipping LTO-8 drives for well over a year, customers around the world have not been able to use the LTO-8 tapes designed to work with them. That’s because delivery of LTO-8 tapes has been held up due to a patent infringement lawsuit raging in US Federal Court between Sony and Fujifilm, which are …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 34

  August 26, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  It’s still summer here in PTF Land, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, so there is not a lot of action right now. In this week’s episode of the IBM i PTF Guide, we have new SAP support info for the 7.4, 7.3, and 7.2 releases of IBM i and we also have a new Content Manager Group PTF SF99652 for 7.4 and updated groups for 7.3 and 7.2. You will also find updated Backup and Recovery Group for 7.4, 7.3, and 7.2.

  As for New (Updated) Links in this week’s Guide:

  • SSHD, RUNRMTCMD: Remote Command Execution from

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• Big Power News On The Horizon, And Some Other Stuff For Now

  August 19, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are awaiting a bunch of things coming out of Big Blue with regard to the Power Systems line, but the engineers are always tweaking the product line to meet customer demand even after things have been shipping for a while. So it is with the “Fleetwood” Power E980 system that IBM debuted last summer using the “Cumulus” 12-core, heavy thread variant of the Power9 processor family and the Enterprise Pool CPU capacity pooling software that runs on enterprise-class Power Systems iron.

  But before we get into all of that, a reminder of what we are expecting to see from …

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• Boutique Footwear Company Finds A Great Fit With Node.js

  August 19, 2019 Alex Woodie

  As one of the premier providers of winter footwear in North America and Europe, Kamik knows what it takes to run a successful manufacturing operation. But when its custom RPG-based ERP system started to show its age, the company turned to Node.js to help modernize production systems, and found that it improved application integration and developer productivity along the way.

  “Legacy” is a word that the folks at Kamik can take pride in. Founded in Quebec in 1898, Kamik remains a family owned business to this day, with factories located in Canada and the United States. Through its brand-name and …

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• Guru: Going Dark In RDi

  August 19, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  In this article I am going to show you how to configure RDi for dark mode. Dark mode is where the background of an application is changed from white to black. Some say that dark mode makes text (and especially code) easier to read. Others say it’s more difficult to read. Personally, I am a convert, but I know other developers who hate it. Maybe you should give it a try and see which you prefer.

  Recently, there has been a lot of debate about dark mode (mostly prompted by Apple introducing it as an option in its operating systems), …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 19

  August 19, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  Today marks one year since we lost our friend and colleague Dan Burger. It still doesn’t seem real most of the time, but we have forged ahead, like he encouraged us to do, although we all still miss him. I started writing this feature for him, intermittently at first when he was too sick to do it, and I was glad to do it because it was one of the few things I could do to help. Now I write it every week with a weird mixture of sadness from being reminded of losing my friend and pride as I …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Numbers 32 And 33

  August 19, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  It’s “ketchup time” here at the IBM i PTF Guide, and we have two weeks of stuff lined up. So let’s just go through it in order and get you all current.

  In Number 32 of the Guide, there is a Security Bulletin for Vulnerabilities, which includes CVE-2019-0196, CVE-2019-0197, and CVE-2019-0220 in the IBM i operating system as it related to the HTTP Server. Here’s the link. Releases 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4 of IBM i are affected.

  • Release 7.2 – SI69901
  • Release 7.3 – SI69900 and SI69828
  • Release 7.4 – SI69187 and SI69189

  There is a new …

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