• Being Agile With IBM i In A Changing Business Climate

  February 26, 2018 Dan Burger

  Business conditions are changing, and C-level executives are troubled by a lack of IT responsiveness to changing business conditions.

  CIOs are feeling the pressure to step up. At the bi-annual CIO Summit, hosted by Seiden Group’s Alan Seiden, IT executives discuss agile development practices as one tool to help their IBM i development teams deliver better business solutions in situations where IT is breaking new technical ground or user requirements are uncertain.

  “IBM i environments of the past were unified with RPG and Db2 and with few choices for user interface. Developers would copy an older program and …

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• Guru: Ready Or Not, Big Changes in RDi V9.6! Part 1, Key Behavior

  February 26, 2018 Susan Gantner

  Version 9.6 of RDi has many new features. If you’ve upgraded your RDi, you have undoubtedly noticed some of the enhancements, because most of the new features are enabled by default. Just in case you’re not a huge fan of some of those features, most can also be disabled to make things work as before if you know where to look.

  In this series, we’ll take a look at some of the new features and how to enable and/or disable them. In this first part, we’ll study two new key behaviors and how to control them.

  Many of the enhancements …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: About Face

  February 26, 2018 Hesh Wiener

  There was a time when a typeface was made of metal and its characters, called glyphs, physically transferred ink to paper. Today, a typeface is a set of symbols that may be used to transfer ink to paper or to paint text on a screen or to inform a heads-up display. Beginning in November 2017, IBM put its corporate clout behind a signature family of typefaces called Plex. Plex will also be a signature for Ginny Rometty and IBM’s paean to Johannes Gutenberg.

  Gutenberg, born about 1400, developed technology that enabled the industrial production of printed matter, including …

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• GDPR Deadline Looms for IBM i Shops

  February 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Have you seen the website with the Grim Reaper counting down the days when support for IBM i 7.1 will end? There are 63 days left, if you’re keeping track. But a scant 25 days after IBM stops supporting IBM i 7.1 on April 30, time will be up for another important IT milestone: compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

  The GDPR is a major new data privacy and protection law that goes into effect on May 25. It was passed two years ago by the European Commission with the goal of standardizing the wide assortment of laws …

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• Tooling Around With IBM i Access Client Solutions Announcements

  February 21, 2018 Dan Burger

  Access Client Solutions (ACS) received several feature/function enhancements when the Technology Refreshes were announced last week with a little something for end users, system administrators, and database engineers. Although nothing stands out as a major item, this is an incremental release fulfilling user-requested features.

  The 5250 emulator is a good example. It’s a key technology that is likely the most used component in ACS, but it’s been around for so long it’s easy to think there’s nothing new in emulation. But users never seem to cease to ask for something new: support for Chinese CCSID 1371 is one of those …

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• BRMS Cloud Backups Get Recovery Teeth

  February 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (BRMS) have been able to save their backups to the cloud for over a year. However, they faced restrictions when it came to restoring those backups to a system that wasn’t the originating server, which made the feature less useful in real-world disaster. Now IBM and its development partners are removing that restriction with the latest batch of IBM i tech refreshes.

  We touched on the new BRMS capability last week in our round-up story about IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 4 (TR4) and IBM i 7.2 TR8. …

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• IBM Patches ‘ROBOT’ Flaw in IBM i Crypto Library

  February 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM has issued patches to fix a serious security problem in the IBM Global Security Kit, or GSKit, a relatively obscure crypto package that implements SSL/TLS encryption algorithms across a variety of IBM products, including IBM i. An old flaw in the underlying RSA crypto algorithm that could let hackers decrypt data in a “side channel” attack has resurfaced under a new moniker: “ROBOT.”

  GSKit is an IBM toolkit that implements various encryption-related functions, including symmetric and asymmetric ciphers, random number generation, hashing algorithms, and encryption key management capabilities, for products that need over-the-wire encryption, including IBM i, Linux, and …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 21

  February 21, 2018 Dan Burger

  Artificial intelligence (AI) may be the goose that laid the golden egg, with promises of systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. But there are seldom talked about dangers that could cook your goose. Pay attention to regulatory compliance, law, privacy, and ethics as you integrate AI into your systems.

  Class action lawsuits are barking at the heels of Intel stemming from the handling of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. These stories, plus tips on communications skills that aid project planning, make it into …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 7

  February 21, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  This is our latest Spectre and Meltdown (SM) speculative execution security vulnerabilities update. We finally got the straight answer on firmware to models from IBM. We have updated the SM worksheet in the IBM i PTF Guide to reflect what we have learned. Just a reminder, the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution security vulnerabilities have been classified by IBM’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) as having a “High Severity” level.

  There are no changes to the PTF Groups this week. I suspect the Power9 announcement and Tech Refreshes have kept everyone busy.

  Here is a rundown on the IBM …

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• Drilling Down Into The New Power9 Entry Servers

  February 19, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last Wednesday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we gave you a high-level overview of the six new Power9 entry servers, code-named “ZZ” by IBM, as well as an initial pass on the changes that came with the latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3. If you haven’t read these, please do, because they give you information on IBM’s strategy with regard to the Power9 iron and the IBM i platform.

  In this issue, we are going to drill down into the six new Power9 systems, taking particular care with the single-socket Power S914 and dual-socket Power …

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