• What You Will Find In IBM i 7.6 TR1 and IBM i 7.5 TR7

  October 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It’s early October, which means leaves are changing colors, nights are getting colder, and IBM developers in southern Minnesota and elsewhere are gearing up the autumnal Technology Refreshes for the IBM i operating system.

  With last week’s announcements of TR1 for IBM i 7.6 and TR7 for IBM i 7.5, which ship November 21, IBM has committed to delivering a slew of updates and new functionality across the range of IBM i system software, from application development to administration.

  Before we get into the specific areas of IBM i, let’s cover the general enhancements it made with I/O handling. For …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 41

  October 13, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  I don’t know about you, but we figured there were Technology Refreshes coming, especially with IBM’s TechExchange 2025 developer conference going on last week. However, unlike in past years, we didn’t get any advanced warning. So check out the initial coverage of the new TRs for IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.6 and keep an eye out for the coming weeks of detailed drill-downs.

  There is also a pretty serious set of vulnerabilities in the IBM i platform that you need to deal with. Check out Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by Remote Code Execution, Deserialization of Untrusted …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 40

  October 6, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to another edition of the IBM i PTF Guide. Let’s get right to it.

  This week we start off with new microcode for Firmware 1050. . . specifically for 1050.52 and 1050.60 levels. These service packs include the following Security/HIPER issues: A security problem was fixed for CVE-2025-52497 and CVE-2025-49087 and a security problem was fixed for CVE-2025-38556. This applies to IBM Power S1022s (9105-22B), Power S1022 (9105-22A), and Power S1014 (9105-41B) machines.

  There is also another security vulnerability in the integrated Apache Web server embedded in IBM i. See Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server is affected …

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• Big Blue Delivers IBM i Customer Requests In ACS Update

  August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Christmas is still four months away, but that didn’t stop IBM from giving Access Client Solutions (ACS) customers the new features they requested. The deliveries were made in the mid-summer update, ACS version 1.1.9.9.

  ACS is the must-have tool that lives in every IBM i professional’s toolbox. It contains a slew of facilities for interacting with the system, including RSS, data transfer, IFS file viewing, spool file management, 5250 emulator, 5250 printer emulation, and a virtual console for LAN and HMC management.

  IBM updates ACS several times a year regardless of the Technology Refresh cycle, as is typical with several …

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• IBM To Add Full System Replication And FlashCopy To PowerHA

  August 18, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM will be adding a pair of new technologies to PowerHA SystemMirror in the near future, including Full System Replication (FSR) and Full System FlashCopy (FSFC). The technologies are currently offered through the PowerHA Tools group of products via IBM Expert Labs (formerly Lab Services), but will become part of the mainstream PowerHA offering soon.

  FSR and FSFC have been available for years via IBM Expert Labs toolkits, where they have provided IBM i shops with additional forms of data and application protection above and beyond what they get with BRMS and PowerHA, both of which are still required with …

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• You Can Now Get IBM Tech Support For VS Code For i

  August 11, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that were on the fence about migrating from Rational Developer for i and adopting VS Code for RPG and COBOL development just received one big reason why they should bite the bullet and make the move: the launch of a new technical support package for Code for i from IBM.

  Visual Studio Code is currently the most popular integrated development environment (IDE) on planet Earth, according to multiple measures, such as the Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, which found Microsoft VS Code was used by 76 percent of all respondents, more than twice the usage of …

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• IBM Streamlines Data Migration With New Partition Mirror Tech

  July 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  There is a brand new technology available for migrating data from one IBM i partition to another as part of IBM’s new Migrate While Active tool. It’s called partition mirror, and it gives IBM i shops a potentially less disruptive method for moving data across distances both long and short.

  IBM first unveiled its new Migrate While Active product in October 2024 as part of its announcement introducing subscriptions for the PowerHA high availability and Db2 Mirror continuous availability products. The co-mingling of the announcements made some sense when you consider that the original Migrate While Active product utilized a …

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• The Top Ten IBM i Requests From The IBM Ideas Portal

  April 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue is gearing up for a major new release of the IBM i operating system. We don’t know yet what will be in the release, but we can forge some guesses by checking out what new features the IBM i community is requesting through the IBM Ideas portal, and how IBM reacts to them.

  IBM prides itself on being a customer-focused organization, and so it looks to the IBM i community for direction on what sort of features, capabilities, and fixes the IBM i community currently is looking for. That community outreach takes various forms, including the COMMON Americas …

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• Steve Will Lifts the Curtain On “Major IBM i Announcement,” But Just A Smidge

  March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  If you haven’t heard yet, here it is: IBM is planning to make a major IBM i announcement soon. IBM i chief architect Steve Will said as much during his recent IBM i Guided Tour. While Will shared a general outline of what IBM has in mind for the major announcement, specifics still are few and far between.

  Will, who also holds the titles of IBM i CTO and IBM distinguished engineer, teased the IBM i community with his one-hour February 12 presentation, which is titled IBM i in 2025 – A Strategic Preview. You can access a recording …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Numbers 1 And 2

  January 20, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  With these two first editions of the IBM i PTF Guide, we start the patching of the venerable descendant of the OS/400 operating systems for 2025. And so, it still being January, we can wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year and, for those of you who are struggling because of natural disasters, medical issues, or economic woes, we feel your pain. It is hard for a lot of us right now.

  With that, let us dive into the first and second of the Guides for 2025.

  With Numero Uno, there was not a whole lot going …

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