• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 12

  March 23, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Happy Spring everyone! We are well into Daylight Savings Time and have longer – meaning brighter – evenings, so it is hard not to be optimistic about the spring, summer, and fall ahead. This week, we have one notice and two security vulnerabilities to start with. Let’s get to it.

  Let’s start with the OSP-Distribution requisite for Technology Refresh PTF, which you can find out more about at this link. The PTFs are as follows:

  • For IBM i 7.4: FI0138771, which is PTF SJ09037
  • For IBM i 7.5: FI0138772, which is PTF SJ09038

  Now, for the security vulnerabilities. First, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 11

  March 16, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  The Power11 processors and their systems have in the field since last summer, and for those of you fortunate enough to have a server with that “new car smell,” now is the time to learn about the new processor and systems and figure out how to optimize performance on these machines and take advantage of their special features.

  To that end, IBM has put out a new best practices guide called IBM Power11 Performance Optimization For IBM i to help you begin the processor of tuning up your new machine. You can download it here.

  In addition to this, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 10

  March 9, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  It was a super quiet week in IBM i Land this week. Seriously. Like, we have never seen it so quiet. No security vulnerabilities, no new PTF groups issued for any of the five supported IBM i releases. It has been very, very quiet indeed. So that probably means you need to brace yourself for a bunch of stuff in the next couple of weeks.

  We did want to point out that there are massive price changes coming for Power Systems main memory, which were announced to business partners on March 2 and which take effect on April. (This is …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 9

  March 2, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to March. You have five security vulnerabilities to take care of. The good news is that there is not a lot of other PTF stuff you have to worry about if you are on IBM i 7.3 through IBM i 7.6. There are Group HIPER and Group Security updates for IBM i 7.2, which is still under extended support.

  Let’s go through the security vulnerabilities to start, as we usually do.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM Rational Developer for i is affected by a memory exhaustion loop (CVE-2024-4068), which you can read about here. (And for …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 8

  February 23, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  This week, we start with three security vulnerabilities and a warning about media issues when you put your external LTO drives too close to the running Power Systems iron in your rack.

  Let’s start with the vulnerabilities, as we often do.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by denial of service vulnerabilities in Db2 JSON Store Technology Preview [CVE-2025-66453], which you can read more about here. The fixes for this vulnerability are as follows:

  IBM i Release	PTF Number(s)
  7.4	SJ08547
  7.3	SJ08546
  7.2	SJ08545
  

  Second, we have IBM i Java Development Kit 8 64 & …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 7

  February 16, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  First, we wish you all a happy belated Valentine’s Day, which we were thinking about because we put the IBM i PTF Guide together on Saturday.

  Second, there is a new System Planning Tool, Version 6.26.041.0, which is available for download at this link. We also note that the link to the IBM Systems Workload Estimator and the link to the IBM Systems Energy Estimator no longer work and just take you to a generic IT Infrastructure page that is, how shall we say?, not particularly useful.

  And third, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server could provide …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 6

  February 9, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Here is something handy if you are contemplating moving to IBM i 7.6: A comparison of IBM i 7.5 to IBM i 7.6, from IBM Support and available at this link. If you are moving from releases earlier than IBM i 7.5 to IBM i 7.6, then you should definitely take a gander at this as well. We have added a link in the Guide tab “Links” for this should you need to get to it later and to keep it top of mind.

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

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 5

  February 2, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  This week there’s another winter storm whacking the eastern half of the United States, and we are also putting together the IBM i PTF Guide a little early in case some of the people working on The Four Hundred lose power. If all goes well, and you are reading this on Monday, then we got it all done before anything bad happened.

  This week, we start off with two security vulnerabilities.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: Multiple Vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK affect IBM WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server Liberty due to the January 2026 CPU, which you …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 4

  January 26, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Big Blue is changing its IP addresses for important stuff once again, and that makes this change a High Impact/Pervasive or HIPER issue for IBM i shops. So, customers have to prepare firewalls and proxies for the upcoming infrastructure changes on IBM Fix Central system, which you can read about more at this link. Public internet IP address are changing for the IBM servers that support internet delivery of fixes and updates for customer system’s software, hardware, and operating system. Hostnames are not changing. IBM will complete the implementation of the infrastructure improvements to electronic fix distribution by March …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Numbers 1 Through 3

  January 19, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  We are determined to get you all caught up on the happenings with PTF patches and such that have happened so far in the new year after getting you caught up with what happened at the end of 2025 in last week’s issue.

  So, without further ado, here are the first three editions of the IBM i PTF Guide for 2026, which will end our “Ketchup” Weeks until the next holiday rolls along. (Technically, it is Martin Luther King day in America as we go to press, which is a holiday for many but not for all.)

  We will start …

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