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Guru: Decoding Base64 ASCII

August 18, 2025 Chris Ringer

A co-worker of mine recently asked me how to decode a base64 ASCII string in RPG, received from an HTTP response. My response was “that’s easy”, simply use the relevant SQL function BASE64_DECODE. I promptly wrote some sample code and after some debugging I realized this function threw me a curveball.

Let me demonstrate the issue and offer a simple solution.
```
01 **Free
02 ctl-opt DftActGrp(*No) Copyright('(C) Chris Ringer');

03 dcl-s string_UTF8   varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
04 dcl-s base64_UTF8   varchar(1350) ccsid(*UTF8);
05 dcl-s decoded_UTF8  varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
06 dcl-s decoded_Hex   varchar(1000) ccsid(*HEX);

07 Exec SQL Set Option Commit=*NONE, Naming=*SYS;
08 string_UTF8 = 
```
…
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Guru: A Faster Way To Sign A JWT

July 21, 2025 Chris Ringer

In my prior article, which you can read here, I discussed using the OpenSSL tool to asymmetrically sign a JWT. I like OpenSSL because it’s an open source solution available on many platforms and easy to use. But the decision to use OpenSSL should be coupled with the performance level expectations (the PLA) for your project.

For instance, how many tokens will you need to create in a given interval? Will your newly minted tokens expire 24 hours from now or in 5 minutes? In my case currently, only about 5 JWTs are needed per day so …
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Need Data Off An Old Tape? The Backup Crackers Can Help

March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

What happens when you need data from an old backup tape, but no longer have the vintage IBM hardware it was backed up from, let alone a subscription to the application it was created from nor the backup software it was created with? If you find yourself in such a predicament, the folks at S2|Data would like to hear from you.

“We are backup software format crackers,” says Brendan Sullivan, the founder and chief executive officer of S2|Data. “What we do is we look at the media, which might be tape or it might be disk, and we figure …
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Guru: Web Concepts For The RPG Developer, Part 1

April 22, 2024 Chris Ringer

Way back in the 1990s, I recall accessing data with only RPG III F-Specs. But nowadays some of that critical data may live in the cloud. The good news is tools like HTTPAPI and RXS and SQL functions like SQL HTTP are available to access that remote data from the IBM i. But what you may not know is how to actually format components in those HTTP requests.

Here I will discuss some techniques to build those components in an HTTP request before sending it across the web.

HTTP Get Versus Post

The two most common methods for an HTTP …
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Shield Adds HMC, Security PTFs to Nagios Monitoring Solution

March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie

If you’d like to know what’s going on with your Hardware Management Console (HMC), you can do so through the updated Nagios offering from Shield Advanced Solutions. Version 2.1 of the company’s bundled AAG and NG4i offering also will automatically notify you when IBM has submitted security PTFs for the operating system or licensed products, and even download them for you.

After initially trying to use IBM’s open source Nagios software to monitor their customers’ high availability software environments, the folks at Shield Advanced Solutions took it upon themselves to develop their own Nagios distribution for the IBM i server, …
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Malware Threats and Cyber-Recovery on IBM i

May 26, 2021 Brian Barth

Cyber threats have evolved from the traditional vectors of theft and direct attacks to more financial driven cyber destruction and extortion, especially via ransomware. Hospitals, manufacturers, universities and financial institutions have all been attacked in the last year, and the rate of attacks is increasing as networks become more accessible to support remote workers. The Colonial Pipeline attack has demonstrated that even the critical infrastructure that supports our supply chains is not invulnerable.

In 2021, more than three quarters of attacks are financially motivated, and over half of those attacks are ransomware – an attack in which files are typically …
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The (More) Modern RPG Language

December 16, 2019 Bob Cozzi

Back in 1988, I wrote what became the book on RPG III. Then in 1996, I published the RPG IV version and updated it again circa 2000. But in the years that followed, RPG IV became mostly stale; a tweak here and there, but nothing too spectacular.

In recent years, a wave of RPG IV enhances has been revealed, most notably free-format was completed and helped propel RPG IV, once again into a truly modern language. Although the measure of “modern” for RPG IV seems to lean toward how much free-format syntax is supported; which is ironic considering COBOL and …
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Guru: Decoding Base64 ASCII

Guru: A Faster Way To Sign A JWT

Need Data Off An Old Tape? The Backup Crackers Can Help

Guru: Web Concepts For The RPG Developer, Part 1

HTTP Get Versus Post

Shield Adds HMC, Security PTFs to Nagios Monitoring Solution

Malware Threats and Cyber-Recovery on IBM i

The (More) Modern RPG Language

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search