• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 36

  September 13, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  Hello IBM i shops, it is always important to keep your system up to date, which is why we provide the IBM i PTF Guide. But just to keep perspective here, for those companies and personnel dealing with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma or the impending Hurricane Jose, and for those who are dealing with the Western part of this country being on fire, the fixes below can probably wait a day or so. Be safe!

  This week in the guide we have HIPERs, DB2, and Defective fixes for all three releases:

  IBM i 7.3 HIPER group and PSP - 

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• The Chatter About Future Power9 Servers

  September 11, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In late July, the first of the Power9 systems, the one code-named “Witherspoon” that was designed explicitly to be installed in the “Summit” and “Sierra” clustered supercomputers installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, respectively, started rolling off the production line at Big Blue and into those HPC centers that are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. It is the beginning, however quiet, of what we expect will be a rolling thunder rollout of Power9 systems in late 2017 and through early 2018.

  Because there have been so many processor announcements in the past …

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• Lack Of Available RPG Skills Not A Hard Problem To Fix

  September 11, 2017 Dan Burger

  Running an IT department can be a grind. The reliability and manageability of your hardware and software certainly influences how hard the grind becomes, but the job becomes so much easier when you have a staff that removes much of your burden. Successfully developing that staff and creating a positive culture while dealing with turnover and “do more with less” imperatives has a huge impact on whether the CIO or IT director manages the grind or gets ground up. And once in a while, a new addition to the staff comes with a surprisingly positive impact. That leads me into …

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• Guru: Remove Unwanted Trailing Blanks With LPEX

  September 11, 2017 Ted Holt

  Giving up RDi and going back to developing with PDM and SEU would appeal to me as much as giving up electricity and running water and moving into a pup tent. RDi has so many nice features that enrich my life. However, RDi does have its quirks, and occasionally I run into one of them.

  One of the nice features is the ability to comment and uncomment blocks of code in one fell swoop. In case you’ve forgotten (or didn’t know about) those shortcuts, Ctrl+/ comments out a line or block and Ctrl+\ removes the comment markers. I recommend you …

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• As I See It: The Power Of Pizza

  September 11, 2017 Victor Rozek

  When you become the richest man in the world, if only for a few hours by virtue of stock market fluctuations, you nonetheless acquire an additional layer of gravitas. Suddenly, everything you say or do has added significance. Small actions are credited with great meaning. The trivial becomes transcendent.

  Which is probably why, the day after the New York Times announced that Jeff Bezos had toppled Bill Gates from his golden throne as the world’s richest man, the usually sober Business Insider gushed about his managerial prowess. The article appeared under the preposterous headline: “The ‘two pizza rule’ is a …

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• IBM Flashes the Cache On External Storage

  September 11, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM put more a little flash in its storage, specifically its high-end DS8000 arrays, which got new solid state drive options that will boost raw flash storage close to 3 petabytes in a single installation. Big Blue also cached in with its Storwize V7000, which now features up to 256 GB of RAM, among other new features.

  Let’s begin the news with the Storwize V7000, which is an X86-based storage system that’s becoming increasingly popular among midsize and large IBM i shops that are looking to consolidate storage but who can’t justify the added expense and complexity of the high-end …

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• IBM i Salaries Drop Vs. Other Platforms, But It’s Not All Bad

  September 6, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Time was, working on IBM i and its predecessors earned you a premium on your salary compared to other platforms. That’s not the case in 2017, as equivalent jobs on the Linux, Unix, Windows (LUW) front delivers better pay. But the news on the job front is not all doom and gloom, according IBM i staffing expert Bob Langieri, who keeps a close watch on this sort of thing.

  Across the board, IBM i professionals earned lower salaries than their LUW colleagues for various IT positions, with a few exceptions. That’s according to an analysis of IBM i salary data …

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• ARCAD Magnifies The i In Its Multi-Platform Array

  September 6, 2017 Dan Burger

  While RDi development gets some help from one IBM i vendor, another vendor is enhancing its RDi-specific software. ARCAD Software, makers of ARCAD Pack for i, has enhanced its IBM UrbanCode Deploy and improved support for deployment to IBM i.

  IBM’s UrbanCode is a tool for automating application deployments by expediting user feedback, and for providing audit trails and the approvals process. UrbanCode is being used primarily by large companies to deploy multi-platform code from a central point. It provides standardized tools and methodologies for managing all sources–including IBM i, z/OS, AIX and other Unix OSes, and all the …

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• IBM i Vulns Spotted in Node, BIND and HTTP Server

  September 6, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month moved to patch several critical security vulnerabilities related to the BIND service in IBM i that could allow attackers unauthorized access to IBM i servers running any release of the OS from IBM 6.1 to 7.3. Security glitches were also patched for the IBM i implementation of Node.js, the HTTP Server bundled with IBM i, the hardware management console (HMC), and WebSphere.

  Both ISC BIND vulnerabilities work in a similar way and enabled similar paths into affected systems – namely by allowing an attacker to craft a specially crafted request packet to bypass authentication and therefore gain …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, September 6

  September 6, 2017 Dan Burger

  Two app dev strategies are fighting for supremacy. DevOps is a cultural and organizational shift that empowers enterprise software teams to deliver better software quicker – in particular, hand-coded software. Low-Code platforms, in contrast, provide a technology platform and visual tooling that deliver better software quicker – with little or no hand-coding required.

  The continued success of RPG depends on several factors. Maintaining the status quo is not one of them. See what it takes to build an RPG future in this week’s Monitor. Also discover the latest move by Vision Solutions’ new owner, and why BI and analytics …

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