• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 46

  November 14, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  This week, you will find much to your surprise that Access Client Solutions 1.1.9.1, which was promised for delivery on December 2 back at the NAViGATE 2022 COMMON conference in St Louis, is out a few weeks early. We saw it available and downloaded it on November 11, which means it is a few weeks early.

  ACS 1.1.9.1 follows on the heels of the 1.1.9.0 release that came out in April 2022, with mitigations for the Log4j security vulnerabilities. We don’t know the full set of enhancements yet, but this IBM i – ACS Updates page at Big Blue …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 45

  November 7, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Hello good people of IBM i Land. There’s a security vulnerability you need to take a look at to see if it affects your system, and a whole bunch of PTF patches for all kinds of things. Let’s start with the vulnerability, which you can see in Security Bulletin: Zlib for IBM i is vulnerable to a buffer overflow issue during inflate (CVE-2022-37434) and which you can find out more about here.

  This is not the same vulnerability in Zlib for IBM i that we told you about last week, so don’t think we are a skipping record here. …

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• OpenSSL Flaw No ‘Heartbleed,’ But Other New Vulns Detected

  November 2, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The cybersecurity world has been sitting on pins and needles for the past 48 hours, ever since news of a potentially devastating new flaw in OpenSSL started to leak out early Monday morning. That flaw turned out to be not as bad as initially feared, but that shouldn’t stop IBM i shops from patching other recent flaws, including some pretty serious ones in WebSphere Liberty, Java, the CCA, and Zlib.

  News started to emerge earlier this week of a critical OpenSSL flaw that required the utmost attention. The flaw could be a concern for just about everybody, including IBM, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 44

  October 31, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Remember all of those quiet weeks in PTF Land when nothing much was going on? There is a whole bunch of stuff this week.

  First, starting October 26, IBM has enabled multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all its websites using IBMid. As a user on the Entitled Systems Support website, you are using IBMid to login, so you are impacted by the change. When you first login after the change is implemented, you will be asked to add an additional authentication method – either a code sent to your email or a supported mobile authenticator app available on Google Play Store …

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• New Nav Makes Progress, But Still Not Caught Up with Old Nav

  October 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The Technology Refreshes have brought IBM closer to completing the transition to the new Navigator from the old Navigator product, which is susceptible to the Log4j security vulnerability. While the advances in IBM i 7.5 TR1 and 7.4 TR7 will help customers, the new Navigator product will still not be at feature parity with old Nav when the plug is pulled on the heritage product at the end of the year.

  IBM has been encouraging its IBM i customer base to accelerate its adoption of the new Navigator, which debuted just over a year ago with the introduction of IBM …

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• Inside IBM i’s New Geospatial Functions For Db2

  October 24, 2022 Alex Woodie

  One of the more interesting elements of the recent IBM i Technology Refreshes is the addition of Watson-based geospatial functions to the Db2 for i relational database. According to IBM, the new capabilities will make it simpler and easier to incorporate advanced geospatial functions into IBM i applications.

  As its name implies, Db2 for i’s new geospatial functions allow people to compute data that has a geographical aspect to it. In this case, the geographical data takes the form of latitude and longitude readings on the Earth, and the functions provide ways to manipulate those points (as well as lines …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 43

  October 24, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  We are happy to report that there are no new security vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack and related open-source software this week – at least as far as we know. So, rejoice in that. There are a bunch of HIPER PTFs and fixes for Java that span the current IBM i releases on support and extended support, so be aware of those.

  And just a reminder to keep checking out The Four Hundred in each issue as we drill down into new details related to the Tech Refreshes announced this month, and that are coming in December.

  Now, here …

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• Doing Disaster Recovery Planning Right For Your IBM Power Iron

  October 19, 2022 Jason Hardy

  As I was writing this article, I saw this in my LinkedIn news feed, according to Axios.com: “billion-dollar weather disasters now happen once every 18 days.” My perception was that the United States was getting more frequent significant weather events and it turns out that data from the National Weather Service backs that up.

  Now add in hardware/software failures, cyber security events and local disasters (fire, water damage, power outages) and it makes sense that disaster recovery is one of the top challenges facing CIOs today. If this is a topic you are contemplating, here are a few questions to …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 42

  October 17, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  The hot news this week, which we have reported about previously and which we will be drilling down into more deeply, is that the Fall 2022 Tech Refresh updates for IBM i have been announced and will be generally available on December 2. The theme from IBM is “Let’s create a new level of integrated simplicity,” and you can see more about IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 1 at this link and more about IBM i 7.4 Technology Refresh 7 at that link.

  Keep checking out The Four Hundred as we drill down into new details related to the …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 41

  October 10, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Just a reminder in case you didn’t see it last week: End of Marketing for IBM i 7.3 is 4/28/23 and end of standard support for IBM i 7.3 is 9/30/23. You can read IBM’s support statement about it here and you can see our related coverage on it there.

  Also: QMGTOOLS and FTP Credentials required for Enhanced Customer Data Repository (ECuRep), find out more at this link.

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

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Security
  • MustGather: How To Obtain and Install

  …

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