• Shield Builds on Success with Nagios for IBM i

  September 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Traditional system monitoring tools on IBM i are valuable, but they have one big downside: They often require an operator to sit there and stare at the screen to detect when things go wrong. “That gets old very quickly,” says Chris Hird, the Shield Advanced Solutions director who found an alternative approach in Nagios.

  Nagios is unique among monitoring tools – at least in the IBM i world – in that it actively runs checks for a variety of systems on monitored machines on a continuous basis. It is constantly pinging target server (and network and storage devices) to check …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 26

  June 26, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  In this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, I have added a Ref tab, which contains general, pertinent information not found elsewhere in the Guide. I also wanted to point out that with a PTF for Advanced Job Scheduler server side, which is SI83469 and which is included in HTTP group PTF update June 2023, AJS will support processing of Set ASP Group when enabled. Finally, IASP support built in!

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • Backup Recovery Solutions
  • IBM HTTP Server for

  …

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• PowerHA Now Replicates To Multiple Targets Sans SAN

  May 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The new release of PowerHA will enable customers to use geographic mirroring to replicate their IBM i data to two or more targets. That one enhancement brings a host of benefits for customers not using SAN-based storage, including new deployment scenarios using on-prem, cloud, and hybrid topologies, as well as lower downtime for hardware upgrades, mirrored Db2 Mirror pairs, and lower RPO for tape backups.

  Prior to PowerHA SystemMirror, most IBM midrange customers who were using high availability (HA) software were using solutions based on logical replication, whereby changes to IBM i data are picked up from the local receiver …

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• Using The Public Cloud For IBM i Disaster Recovery

  April 24, 2023 Ash Giddings

  Disasters can strike at any time, and it’s essential for organizations to have a disaster recovery plan in place to ensure business continuity. However, creating and maintaining a comprehensive disaster recovery plan can be a daunting task, particularly for organizations that rely on IBM i servers, often running business critical applications that perform key functions together with many interfaces into other servers and applications.

  Previously, investments in IBM i disaster recovery solutions were an expensive outlay, requiring significant capital investment in both hardware and software, in addition to the sizable costs associated with running a datacenter.

  Fortunately, with the advent …

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• IBM i Education Goes a Mile High at COMMON’s POWERUp 2023

  April 19, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community is gearing up for POWERUp 2023, the annual conference and expo held by COMMON that is taking place next week in Denver, Colorado. While information on the recent IBM i Technology Refreshes will be in demand, the event in the Mile High City will showcase just about everything going on with the ever-popular midrange server.

  The fun starts bright and early Monday morning at 8:30 MT, with the COMMON POWERUp Opening Session. COMMON President Dawn May will give the community an update on the state of the user group, present awards to the top speakers from …

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• Big Blue Refreshes The Technology for IBM i 7.4 And 7.5

  April 12, 2023 Alex Woodie

  As expected, IBM yesterday unveiled its Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i, including version 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8. These are relatively minor releases that bring incremental improvements to core areas of the platform, including IBM i Navigator, IWS, PowerHA, and RPG, among others. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but the enhancements are undoubtedly just what many users need.

  We’re going to dive into each of the enhancements and do full coverage of them in the coming weeks here at IT Jungle. For today, we’re going to provide a broad overview of the new stuff that IBM just announced this …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 4

  January 23, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Here are some reminders to start off the IBM i PTF Guide this week.

  First, there are new releases for Access Client Solutions and the ODBC database driver. (See ACS_NAV in the Guide for the links.) The funny bit – funny odd, not funny hilarious – is that version 26 of ACS did not allow companies to create a database source for ODBC, which is serious shortcoming. Now, there is a new version 27 that will let you do it. Here is the updated software:

  Description				   Version
  IBM i Access Client Solutions (1.1.9.1)	   1.1.9.1
  ACS Windows App Pkg English (64bit)	   

  …

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• 2022: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Well, it’s that time of year again – time to look back on the year and contemplate what happened. It was another eventful year in the midrange, with new servers and new operating systems. The IBM i user and vendor communities also worked to make it a rewarding year.

  2021 started innocently enough back in . . .

  January

  Cybercriminals earned a gazillion demerits for their early 2021 Christmas present to cybersecurity professionals: Log4j, the most critical security vulnerability to hit the IT world in years. With a perfect CVSS severity rating of 10, Log4j sent security professionals scrambling in …

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• Top 5 New IBM i Features to Check Out Now That Fall TRs Are GA

  December 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  All of the new features that IBM unveiled earlier this fall with the Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 (as well as another stealth “non-TR” TR for 7.3) are now generally available. Some of them shipped before December 2, but pretty much all of them are now GA. With so much enterprise computing goodness ready to download, what will you adopt first?

  We know it’s not Christmas yet. But with so many new features, it can be hard to figure out what to do first. While everybody has their own computing priorities, we have our own ideas for …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 47

  November 28, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  It is a busy, busy week for the IBM i PTF Guide, folks. So get some coffee. There are a bunch of security vulnerabilities that you need to take a look at, and there are also some recommended fixes that are not included in either the PTF groups or the cumulative PTF updates.

  First, there is Security Bulletin: IBM Transform Services for IBM i is vulnerable to denial of service, buffer overflow, and allowing attacker to obtain sensitive information due to multiple vulnerabilities, which you can read more about at this link. The fixes for this vulnerability can …

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