• IBM i Community Predictions For 2022, Part 1

  January 10, 2022 Alex Woodie

  While the month and year ostensibly are just values in the date field, when the calendar flips over from December to January, things feel different. There’s a greater sense of hope and optimism for what the new year will bring. Coming off another calamitous year filled with COVID-19, perhaps it’s we need that even more so this year.

  It has become an IT Jungle tradition to ask members of the IBM i community at the start of the year for their predictions. This year is no different, and so we’ll kick off the first part of our (most likely) two-part …

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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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• Ransomware Attacks Hit Closer To Home

  July 12, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Fifteen hundred organizations around the world had their data locked up in the latest ransomware attack, including grocery store chains and schools. It’s unclear if any IBM i shops were included in the attack, which a Russian hacking group claimed credit for. But it’s clear that ransomware is a growing threat to all organizations, including IBM i shops.

  On July 2, as hundreds of millions of Americans hunkered down for the long Independence Day holiday weekend, hackers using the REvil were just getting started. The Russian-affiliated hacking group had already done the hard work of exploiting a five-year-old security flaw …

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• Security Checks Drive Consulting Biz for Briteskies

  June 14, 2021 Alex Woodie

  With high-profile ransomware attacks becoming the norm and calls for a federal cybersecurity department gaining steam, there’s a distinct uneasiness when it comes to the security of corporate computer systems. That uptick in awareness is helping to drive business for Briteskies, the Cleveland, Ohio-based IT consultancy that has made IBM i security a cornerstone of its business.

  Briteskies was founded in 2000 primarily as a JD Edwards specialist for organizations in the Great Lakes region. Over the years, the company has expanded into other niches, including Magento e-commerce systems, custom RPG development, and computer security.

  The market for IBM i …

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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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• Guru: Generate SQL for Dependents

  May 24, 2021 Paul Tuohy

  Way back in October 2014, in the article Find A View Of A View Of A View. . ., I detailed a stored procedure that, given the name of a table or a view, provides the full list of dependent views and all of their dependents and all of their dependents, etc. This is a stored procedure that has served me well in the world of DDL, where it is common to have views of views of views.

  In this article I will describe a follow-on stored procedure that will generate the DDL for a given table/view and all …

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• Ransomware Epidemic Hits Epic Proportions, And IBM i Shops Take Notice

  May 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The ransomware outbreak hit home for millions of Americans last week when attackers shut down a major East Coast pipeline as well as a hospital network on the West Coast. For IBM i shops, the events are a potent reminder to re-evaluate network security and data protection systems to ensure they’re resilient from attack.

  You could be forgiven for thinking you were watching an episode of Mr. Robot last week as news spread of the shutdown of Colonial Pipeline network, which provides 45 percent of the gasoline for the entire East Coast of the United States through 5,500 miles of …

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• Locking Down Exit Point And IFS Vulnerabilities On IBM i

  March 24, 2021 Pauline Brazil Ayala

  It’s true that the IBM i server is among the most securable servers on the planet. But all too often, customers do not take the time to secure their environments properly. This is particularly true for two of the most oft-neglected components of the IBM i environment: exit points and the IFS.

  IBM introduced exit points with the launch of OS/400 V3R1 way back in 1994. We remember that version well here at Trinity Guard, because soon after that, we developed the industry’s first exit point monitoring software for the AS/400 at PentaSafe, the spiritual predecessor of our company. …

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• Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops

  February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always a wonder to us that, in this day and age, every IBM i shop, which is by definition running mission critical workloads, is not using high availability clustering of systems in their datacenter, disaster recovery and failover of some type or another to a remote site, and supplemental security to lock down those parts of the system that are not, by default within the IBM i platform, locked down.

  It’s a bit of a mystery. Of the 120,000 to 150,000 unique customers running IBM i platforms in the world, maybe 20,000 have some sort of HA/DR and …

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• New Release Of ACS Now Available

  December 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM delivered a new release of Access Client Solutions (ACS) last week, right on schedule. With ACS version 1.1.8.6, users will find a host of new features designed to accelerate their productivity across a range of uses.

  ACS is the Java-based utility that has become one of the most used (and useful) ways that administrators, programmers, and engineers can interact with the IBM i server. The software, which is free to IBM i customers on maintenance, features a 5250 emulator, 5250 printer emulation, data transfer capabilities, IFS file viewing, spool file management, and a virtual console for LAN and HMC …

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