• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 46

  November 13, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  There’s a bunch of stuff going on this week in IBM i PTF Land. So let’s just get to it.

  First, we have a security vulnerability, which you can find out more about in Security Bulletin: IBM i is vulnerable due to a flaw in Samba which could allow an attacker to bypass security restrictions (CVE-2023-4091), located at this link. The issues can be fixed by applying a PTF to IBM i. IBM i releases 7.4, 7.3, and 7.2 will be fixed. The IBM i PTF number for 5770-SS1 contains the fix for the vulnerability.

  IBM i Release	5770-SS1 

  …

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• Power Systems Software Gets Its Updates And Tweaks

  November 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would not be a spring or fall IBM i Technology Refresh cycle if there were not some improvements to the auxiliary systems software that is an adjunct to the Power Systems stack. By which we mean the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC custom edition of the OpenStack cloud controller, the Hardware Management Console, the Cloud Management Console, and the system firmware for the Power iron itself.

  In announcement letter AD23-0498, you will see that all of these have been updated and you will also see how they are all intertwined with each other, cross-supporting their respective updates. …

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• Last Chance To Be A Part Of The IBM i Marketplace Survey

  November 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Soon, Forta will close out its annual IBM i Marketplace Survey, so now is your last chance to participate and help us all better understand what is going on in the IBM i on Power Systems community.

  The IBM i Marketplace Survey and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey, which are both presented each February, are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly so since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other IT market researchers and consultancies have long since stopped tracking Power Systems in any kind of detail …

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• Power Systems Still Climbing Despite This Weird Economy

  October 30, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the old days, IBM used to talk about System z, Power Systems, and storage as separate things because they are, largely, separate things. Even if customers of the mainframe and Power platforms sometimes buy IBM storage for their machines, and even if some of that storage is actually based on Power platforms themselves.

  But to be able to brag about the System z business every quarter and to make the rest of its Infrastructure group look like a bigger thing, Big Blue merged its Power Systems and Storage divisions into something it has called Distributed Systems for the …

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• What IBM i Shops Are Thinking About Right Now

  October 30, 2023 Ron Venzin

  If you listen to the national and global media, it is hard to figure out what is really going on in the world at the strategic and tactical levels of individual companies. The global happenings are like climate trends, but each company generates its own weather and reacts to the weather generated by the customers and competitors in its own market. Or markets, as the case may be.

  Because we all live in the weather as we are trying to keep an eye on the climate – people really do talk about the economic climate but no one talks about …

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• The Plus Things Change, The Plus Things Stay The Same

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like nearly all of you, I have never read the autobiographical romance novels of Jean-Baptise Alphonse Karr, or read back issues of the satirical Le Figaro newspaper that were nearly two centuries old when Karr was editor of that paper, which is today aimed at the upper middle class and which is still one of the papers of record for France.

  But like nearly all of you, I am very familiar with one of the witticisms that came out of Karr’s pen: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Which translates into American as something akin to: …

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• Why Big Blue Is Simplifying The IBM i LPP Stack

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If only the paranoid survive, as legendary Intel co-founder Andy Grove once quipped, then we all would pretty much have to be paranoid pretty much all the time. And this, obviously, would not be healthy. But as legendary founder of The Four Hundred, the irreplaceable and irascible Hesh Wiener, once quipped, sometimes they really are out to get you.

  And so, we come to IBM’s recent “come to Bezos” moment starting late last year that it was going to be providing subscription pricing for hardware and systems software for the IBM i platform running on Power Systems. We fully …

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• So You Wanna Take Another IBM i Survey, Right?

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to believe that it has been a decade since the IBM i Marketplace Survey was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, now known as Fortra.

  As you might imagine, we miss Dan every day, and we are committed to the mission that he had to better understand what is going on in the IBM i base. Time is running out for you to participate and have your voice heard and your IBM i shop is counted. Please take a moment and take the survey, which you can do …

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• Everybody Needs Monitoring On The IBM i

  October 18, 2023 Chris Hird

  If you are running a software business, you can never go wrong by listening to the customer and then providing what they want.

  Our journey into being an adjunct for the open source Nagios system monitoring tool began when we had a client that wanted to monitor multiple LPAR instances being backed up by our high availability software, HA4i, from a single pane of glass. At the time, we had a PHP interface for our HA4i tool, and we really did not want to rewrite all of that just to be able to give this customer that single pane …

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• The Science Of Lifting And Shifting To The Cloud

  October 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Companies in Japan have a long and deep history with IBM computing systems, both its mainframe and its midrange platforms. And in some cases, they have moved from one to the other to maintain the IBM style of integrated systems while attaining the benefits of what many customers still consider the more integrated, less expensive, and easier to use platform that Big Blue offers: Namely, the AS/400 launched in 1988 and its progeny up through the current IBM i generation.

  Such is the case with Kosei Securities Co Ltd, which was founded way back in 1961 in Osaka, a …

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