• IBM Patches BIND and OpenSSL Flaws in IBM i

  March 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM has patched several security vulnerabilities in the IBM i OS recently, including some lingering problems with OpenSSL, as well as new ISC BIND Delegation Handling vulnerability. The vulnerabilities affect multiple releases of the IBM i OS, and could enable an attacker to successfully crash impacted servers, so go get your PTFs applied as soon as possible. The more critical vulnerabilities are related to the ISC BIND Delegation Handling vulnerabilities, which impact the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) software, specifically the Domain Name Service (DNS). Two BIND-related flaws were discovered in December 2014, according to the Internet Systems Consortium,

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• A Ruby And RPG Conversation

  March 17, 2015 Aaron Bartell

  “Due diligence” and “risk assessment” are phrases that should be running through your head anytime technology decisions are being made where new tooling or ideas are being put into production. The same is true when considering whether the Ruby language has a place in your shop. After all, it is a significant change in direction when introducing a new language to your technology stack. What many people don’t know is the adoption of Ruby (and the Rails web framework) can be done in incremental fashion if that is what works best for you. What I mean by that is not

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• SQL Joins With Tree Structures: An Oracular Point Of View

  March 17, 2015 Ted Holt

  Tree structures are a part of life, especially in the world of manufacturing, where I make my living, so we may as well learn to deal with them. Today I return to this topic, featuring another tool that you can use to tackle the traversal of trees. In IBM 7.1, IBM added support for a tree-traversal syntax that Oracle invented ages ago. This syntax centers on two clauses of the select statement: START WITH and CONNECT BY. I’ll illustrate with a few simple queries. First, we need a tree structure to play with. Here are some simple bills of materials.

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• Death To Decimal Data Errors!

  March 17, 2015 Jon Paris

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. We have all encountered decimal data errors at some time or another. The biggest difficulty they present is that, by the time they have been detected, no recovery is possible. Or to be more precise, no practical recovery is possible. In my previous tip, I mentioned that one of the benefits of data structure I/O is that you can avoid decimal data errors. In this tip I’m going to show you how and why that works. The code package associated with this tip contains three test programs

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• Storagepipe Takes Aim At IBM i Tape Backup And Recovery

  March 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  In the IBM midrange, tape backup is what we do. None of the backup alternatives are even a close second. Internet-based vaulting services, however, continue to make inroads as organizations study ways to achieve quicker recovery times without stepping into the high cost and high complexity of high availability. One of the service companies to keep an eye on is the off-site backup company Storagepipe Solutions. Why are so many organizations completely dependent on tape backup? And why are data recovery plans often an afterthought? You might actually be one of the companies that have given some thought to

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• As I See It: In the Land of the Panel Beaters

  March 16, 2015 Victor Rozek

  A somber-looking man stands in the front of the aisle facing a plane-load of passengers. His arms are crossed above his head and in each hand he holds a high-pressure spray can of poison. Overhead luggage racks are opened, and a brief announcement is made to justify what is about to happen. Two hundred seventy-two passengers descend into apprehensive silence. The man then walks up and down the aisles spraying toxic chemicals ostensibly to kill invasive pests. There are infants and seniors aboard the plane. Everyone is drenched. Welcome to New Zealand. It was barbaric, an uncivilized measure unworthy of

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• Splunking Through IBM i Log Mysteries

  March 16, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Tracking down problems in the modern data center can be an exercise in extreme patience. Today’s mantra of “loosely coupled yet tightly integrated” sounds great theoretically, but doesn’t give you much to go on things start to fail. When the going got tough for one multi-billion-dollar ecommerce operation that relies heavily on the IBM i server, it turned to Splunk to sort it all out. Splunk made a name for itself as a provider of next-gen power tools that enable IT administrators to collect, analyze, and search vast sums of log files generated by a multitude of systems. Instead of

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• IBM i Shops Turn To MSPs For Help

  March 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  Companies are looking to MSPs to help them obtain operational efficiencies and increased value from their IT investments. I wouldn’t call it a hive of activity, but there are more frequent indicators of shops wanting to consolidate IT investment and avoid the upgrading hardware expenses. It is pushing new decisions. Two Connectria Hosting customers that I spoke with last week fit both those descriptions. Here’s what brought them to the popular IBM i MSP. Morgan Craven, director of IT engineering at The Freeman Company, based in Dallas, Texas, described the situation that led him to Connectria as beginning with two

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• Look Ahead With IBM To 2018

  March 16, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The world today is a much different place from the one that the AS/400 was launched into nearly three decades ago. Back then, it was exotic to be moving from basic accounting systems running on batch oriented machines to real-time transaction processing and database querying using relational database technology. It was also a big deal to be moving away from homegrown software to packaged applications tailored to specific industries. Software is far more complex and so are the systems it runs across, and IBM reflects the complexity of the market it serves. Ever since it nearly went bankrupt in the

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• Reader Feedback On Affordable Energy: Investment In The IBM i ISV Community

  March 9, 2015 Thanks for continuing to find new topics to stir conversations around the IBM i marketplace. I just read your story about IBM's ISV support programs and had a few thoughts to share.

  Hi Dan: Thanks for continuing to find new topics to stir conversations around the IBM i marketplace. I just read your story about IBM’s ISV support programs and had a few thoughts to share. One of the challenges for ISVs who want to work in this market is that sometimes the strategies and development methods recommended by IBM are out of touch with the ISV’s market niche. You have to be careful not to follow IBM down a path that can lead you to create an application that IBM developers will praise, but very few customers will buy. Another challenge

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