• IBM Sets Maintenance Withdrawal On Power8 Iron For 2024

  November 16, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  All good things come to an end, and so it is with the Power8-based Power Systems machines. With the Power10 machines in full swing, it is no surprise that IBM is getting set to completely wind down its sales and support of these vintage Power8 systems. Sales have been winding down for the past year, and now Big Blue is warning that maintenance services will expire in 2024.

  Rather than set a single date for all machines to have their maintenance agreements and support expire all at once, IBM has three different dates on which maintenance will come to an …

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• Finally, IBM i Cloud Dev Instances That Are Powerful And Cheap

  October 24, 2022 Chuck Paolillo

  Back in the old days, when IBM had relatively inexpensive entry AS/400 and iSeries machines and was willing to lease them at special low rates to developers, it was possible for software houses and independent code slingers to get their hands on machinery to create and modify applications. Those days are long gone, and it has been very difficult to replace that cheap and usable functionality in the marketplace.

  With Windows Server and Linux platforms, things are a lot easier because developers can create a variant of their X86 server environment right on their desktops or laptops, and if need …

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• IBM i 7.3 Loses Standard Support On September 30, 2023

  October 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue just got the IBM i 7.5 operating system and system software stack out the door for Power9 and Power10 machines back in May, and from that moment the clock was ticking on regular support for the IBM i release that came out in April 2016 and that represents the second most popular release on primary machines based on data from the most recent IBM i Marketplace Survey.

  Most operating system makers – there are not that many of them left in the datacenter these days – offer standard support for their releases and versions for seven years …

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• IBM Rejiggers RPM Repos for Open Source Software

  September 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM has made a change to how it distributes open source software for the IBM i platform. Instead of using a single RPM repository to distribute the software for all release of the IBM i operating system, as has been the case for the past five years, IBM is now delivering software through operating system-specific releases. The change was made to address difficulties that have arisen in the use of a single repo for all releases of IBM i, the company says.

  IBM rolled out its new RPM (which stands for Red Hat Package Manager) back in 2018 as a …

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• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022: Third Party Software Conundrum

  April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Aside from death, most problems are not intractable. But people surely can be, and sometimes are. But luckily not often, and the thing about people is that, generally speaking, they can be reasonable when they are reasoned with. It is with all of this in mind that we come to the next in the State of IBM i Base stories for 2022, where we want to talk about the software trap that the remaining OS/400, i5/OS, and some IBM i shops have gotten themselves into and how we might help them get out of it to the mutual benefit of …

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• 7.1 Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

  April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We think there is a lot of Power7, Power7+, and Power8 iron out there in the Power Systems running IBM i base, and we think there is a lot of IBM i 6.1 and IBM i 7.1 running on that iron. Our assertion is based on years of anecdotal evidence from the resellers and business partners we talk to, the customers we talk to, and a whole lot of spreadsheet witchcraft that we do based on survey data we see.

  The point is not just to come up with this data and then drop it and run, but to face …

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• IBM Accelerates New Nav Development Following Log4j Issue

  February 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  When IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i last fall, executives figured they had time to fill out the new product’s functionality as customers gradually adopted it. But those plans were upended when Log4j rendered the old version vulnerable to a serious security flaw, and now IBM finds itself needing to accelerate the build out of New Nav while simultaneously ramping up promotion and outreach.

  IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i back in September 2021, when it announced the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. New Nav, as the product …

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• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part One: The Operating System

  February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You probably already figured this out, but we love data here at The Four Hundred, and we are always particularly keen on any data that helps us to understand the IBM i ecosystem better. And that is why we always look forward to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey report that comes out in January each year from HelpSystems, and because we are thankful for the data they gather, we help push the survey every year and also participate in the webinar for it as well as a donation to the IBM i community.

  IT Jungle co-editor Alex Woodie …

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• Shield Debuts Nagios Monitoring Solution for IBM i

  December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions last week rolled out a new system monitoring solution based on open-source Nagios technology that gives customers quick insight into the state of their IBM i server. Dubbed AAG, for At A Glance, the product currently monitor 65 IBM i parameters, and can be used with existing Nagios deployments running on Linux or deployed in a standalone manner with an included Linux runtime.

  Nagios is a free open-source software project that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, networking devices, applications, and other IT gear. The software was originally developed in 2002 to monitor Linux systems, and over …

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• IBM Completes Migration of Knowledge Center to IBM Documentation

  April 7, 2021 Alex Woodie

  For years, the IBM Knowledge Center has been the go-to place to get technical information about how things work in IBM i. Got a question about RPG opcodes or ALLOBJ authority? The Knowledge Center was the place for you. As part of its broader overhaul of its online resources and properties, IBM recently completed the migration of its Knowledge Center to the new site, called IBM Documentation.

  IBM i professionals can find all of the content they have grown accustomed to finding at the Knowledge Center on the new IBM Documentation site, which can be found at www.ibm.com/docs/en. There …

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