• Guru: SIEM Is Only Part Of IBM i Cybersecurity

  March 28, 2022 Bruce Bading

  Many times, we hear from IBM i business owners that their SIEM – that’s short for Security Information and Event Management – is their cybersecurity solution for the IBM i. But that can’t be true, and I want to explain why it is part of the security shield but certainly not all of it.

  Let’s start with SIEMs and how they fit into cybersecurity frameworks. SIEM is mentioned in the PCI appendix, but not once in the core of the 250+ PCI DSS requirements, likewise, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework lists event monitoring as one of the 100s (1/100s) of NIST …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 2 – Dealing With CPU Queuing Wait Time

  March 21, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  When we drive our cars, we hope to avoid red lights and traffic jams, because we all hate waiting immobile in traffic. I’m sure that you are aware, fully or subtly, that active jobs in any computer system can encounter wait as well. The IBM i developer team has categorized many types of wait.

  In this article, let’s look at CPU Queuing wait time. Let’s see how we can interpret and address it in a sensible way to resolve poor performance. I’ll try to provide you with a useful approach to wait time analysis using a gloriously useful performance reporting …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 1 – Object Authority Check And Batch Job Performance

  March 7, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  Batch processes are perennial in virtually all kinds of business processing. From time to time, customers have to deal with batch runs that take too long, and many factors influence run time. One such factor in IBM i is how you assign object authority access rights for user profiles to the libraries and objects that are accessed by batch jobs. The importance of this factor can be found in the following case study.

  Many years ago, a customer asked me to determine why batch run time took too long. The customer ran 25 concurrent batch jobs in the batch process …

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• Guru: Would You Rather See a Fire Marshal or a Fire Fighter?

  February 28, 2022 Bruce Bading

  While there are similarities between the two, a fire marshal has a preventive role and focus on preventing fire, whereas a fire fighter has a reactive role and focuses on the putting out the smoldering ruins.

  When it comes to your firm’s cybersecurity practices, would you consider yourselves to be proactive or reactive (Fire Marshal or Fire Fighter)? The biggest difference between the two is your level of vulnerability when an attack does happen.

  There are ongoing practices that you can do to reduce your risk. One thing that we recommend is included in every proactive cybersecurity strategy is a …

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• Guru: Backup to an NAS using RSYNC

  February 14, 2022 Dan Devoe

  Like many small shops, we use a simple tape drive to backup most of our libraries and the contents of the IFS. Each workday, the tape would be changed and the previous tape taken home by someone in IT in case of a disaster.

  But then, COVID hit – there was no one in the office to switch tapes and the same tape was being used to perform nightly backups. What if we discovered a problem with the data from two nights ago? Ordinarily, we would restore one or more libraries or files from the appropriate tape.

  I set up …

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• Guru: Keeping Track Of IBM i System Limits

  January 17, 2022 Dawn May

  Every complex system has limits, and computer systems are no different. During my work with clients over the years I’ve seen many shops push their systems as far as they can go until performance breaks down. The limits I encounter are generally numbers of things: How many objects can exist in a library? How many rows can be inserted into a table? How large can a file in the IFS be?

  Typically, these limits are large and you may think you do not need to worry about them, especially after an upgrade. But as the workload on your system …

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• Guru: Global Variables in Modules

  December 13, 2021 Ted Holt

  When I first learned to program computers (RPG II, COBOL 74), the only kind of variables I knew of were global variables. Any statement within a program was able to use any variable.  It was not until I started my computer science degree that I found out about local variables, which are known to only part of a program. Since that time, it has been my practice to use local variables as much as possible and global variables only when necessary.

  Ideally an RPG program, service program, module, or subprocedure would have no global variables at all, but I don’t …

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• The Four Hundred Guru Retires

  December 13, 2021 Ted Holt

  This is the last issue of The Four Hundred for which I am serving as technical editor.

  I have been editing the technical content of and writing articles for this august publication for 20 years. For most of that time, this has been a side job that I’ve done outside of normal working hours (i.e., nights and weekends). I’m ready for a change. Technical editing and writing are not easy and they take a lot of time, time that I had rather spend doing other things.

  In the days ahead I plan to spend:

  • Less time sitting and more time

  …

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• Guru: RDi 9.6, Part 12 – New Features Targeting New RDi Users

  December 6, 2021 Susan Gantner

  In my previous tip about the latest release (9.6.0.11) of RDi, I promised to cover new features targeting easing the transition from PDM/SEU for new RDi users. If you’re an experienced RDi user, don’t tune out yet — you may find something of interest, too.

  I’ll discuss most of these features in the context of the PDM perspective. This is the perspective designed specifically to ease the transition to RDi. It was introduced originally back in 9.6.0.3 and I covered a little about it in a tip back then. While it was created to target new users, it seems …

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• Guru: Content Assist Plus in Run SQL Scripts

  November 29, 2021 Paul Tuohy

  By now, you should be well aware that Run SQL Scripts provides content assist (promoting) for Select statements (see Guru: ACS 1.1.8.3 Content Assist Includes Prompt For SQL! ). But did you know that you can also use content assist for stored procedures, table functions and parameters? Let’s see how it works, using some of the Integrated File System (IFS) procedures and functions provided by IBM i Services.

  Prompting a Stored Procedure

  Open Run SQL Scripts, type in:

  call qsys2.
  

  Then press F4 (or Ctrl+Space). You will be presented with a list of all the stored procedures in the schema …

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