• Security Gaining Attention On IBM i, But More Progress Needed

  June 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  First, the good news: IBM i shops are paying more attention to security and are making it a priority, according to the 2020 State of IBM i Security Study. But that isn’t necessarily translating into better security, as too much data remains vulnerable, the new report concludes.

  “A deeper understanding of the risks and the security controls built into the OS is currently driving a wave of interest in prioritizing cybersecurity issues on IBM i,” Robin Tatum, director of security technologies at HelpSystems, wrote in the 2020 State of IBM i Security Study, now in its 17th …

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• Why You Need To Implement Exit Point Security – Now

  June 15, 2020 Rich Loeber

  (Sponsored Content) As everyone knows, the only truly secure computer is one that is not networked to any other system or any client, and that has no users doing anything at all on the system. And if you really want to be honest about it, you should probably turn its power off. Then, it would be perfectly secure – and perfectly useless as well.

  To make any system useful, it has to be opened up so it can be reached by the world, and it may be hard to remember this now, three decades after the client/server and …

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• Seiden Group Offers PHP Migration Service

  May 27, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Change is in the air when it comes to PHP on IBM i. The free Zend distribution of PHP that has been adopted by thousands of IBM i shops over the years is going away, and it’s being replaced by a new community distribution that’s installed via RPM. But how can you move existing PHP apps to the new environment? Seiden Group has a potential solution.

  As we told you last week, the Zend Server Basic environment will stop being offered by Perforce (the company that now owns Zend Technology) or distributed with the IBM i operating system on …

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• What’s New In Open Source With The Latest TRs

  April 27, 2020 Alex Woodie

  New technology is exciting. And when it can help you run your business more profitably or efficiently, well, it becomes very exciting. With IBM i, the open source community is arguably the biggest contributor of new technology to the platform. IT Jungle recently checked in Jesse Gorzinski, the IBM i open source architect, to hear how the open source story has improved with the recent technology refreshes.

  Arguably the biggest open source-related enhancement with IBM i 7.4 TR2 and 7.3 TR8 revolves around a change in RPM, the new delivery method that IBM adopted two years ago to distribute new …

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• Guru Classic: Tuning SQL Environments On i

  March 4, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in November 2015. This was one of the first DB2 for i Services that I used in anger. I have used a lot since.

  One of the frustrating things about being a speaker at conferences is that when you want to attend another session with a topic that piques your interest, it invariably clashes with when you are speaking. But every now and again, the scheduling gods work in your favor. Such was the case when I spoke at the excellent International i-Power 2015 conference at Wyboston Lakes Executive Centre in the UK. …

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• Latest TRs For IBM i Now Available

  November 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week delivered the latest IBM i operating system Technology Refreshes, giving good IBM i boys and girls around the world early Christmas presents in areas like programing, operations, database, and security. Here’s a quick recap of the new stuff in IBM i 7.4 TR1 and 7.3 TR7.

  There were several general enhancements with IBM i 7.4 TR1 and 7.3 TR7. For starters, administrators gained more control over resources available to the Integrated Web Server (the one powered by Apache) with the new capability to install it the Web server in a user-specified sub-system. Admins also get new functions …

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• Digging Into the Latest IBM i TRs

  October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The fall batch of Technology Refreshes (TRs) have been revealed, and as expected, there’s a bit of new functionality available for customers who use IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. In this story, we’ll tackle enhancements in open source, systems management and monitoring, and development, which means we’ll dive deeper into other areas, like database and HA/DR, in a future story.

  Let’s start with the fun stuff: open source. With IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1, IBM has brought support for two prominent open source projects, including ZeroMQ and Redis.

  ZeroMQ is a universal messaging library that allows users to …

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• IBM Bolsters ACS with Database and Administrative Goodies

  May 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Amid the many enhancements that IBM has delivered with IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3 TR6 is a new release of Access Client Solutions (ACS), which has become the go-to client interface that many IBM i professionals use to access the system for a variety of tasks. Database engineers and system administrators are the big winners with this release.

  There’s no denying that IBM delivered a whopper of release with IBM i 7.4 and its sidekick, IBM i 7.3 TR6. There’s been so much news – starting with the availability and security enhancements in Db2 Mirror and Authority Collection …

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• R Comes To i

  May 1, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM is now officially supporting the language R with its IBM i operating system, the company announced last week. The open source language, which has long been a favorite of data scientists, statisticians, and others involved with scientific computing, gives IBM i an immediate boost when it comes to data mining and machine learning.

  The R language was originally developed 25 years ago by a pair of computer science professors, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The software, which was developed largely in C and Fortran, was based largely on S, a programming language …

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• Five Skills You Don’t Need To Manage IBM i (And Two You Do)

  March 25, 2019 Tom Huntington

  (Sponsored Content) Much has been said to debunk the myth of an IBM i skills shortage or decry it as a disappearing act. Yet, year after year, respondents to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey by HelpSystems list IBM i skills as a top concern. The results also show that organizations are addressing these concerns by adding automation, modernizing development, and getting rid of obsolete technology that breeds the dreaded word: legacy.

  But why do we on IBM i continue to carry the perception that so-called “IBM i skills” are scarce? Is it because the keywords in …

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