• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 13

  April 5, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  It has been a good week for fixes, people of IBM i Land. The DB2 groups were released for V7R2 and V7R3, and the Performance Tools groups are out for all three V7 releases. Another good thing is that the MG tools announced a new version, and Option 24 on its main menu adds some great functionality for assisting in the management of PTFs on your system.

  But the big news is that the Java client has a new release, V1.1.7.0, with anxiously awaited new functionality. You can download the latest base package at this link: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/i/access/solutions.html.

  As I …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 12

  March 29, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  It is a bit quiet out there in PTF Land this week. But there has been some activity. There is a new HIPER group for each IBM i release that is currently supported, and there are tweaks to Backup and Recovery Groups for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3. There are also some anomalies on other groups.

  For instance, the Must Gather tools usually go along at a pace of updating every two weeks, but now it has been over a month since an update came out. Go figure. . . . The new 5733-OPS Open Source licensed programs have not …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 10

  March 15, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  Technical Refresh updates have been a boon for the IBM i base. They have allowed IBM to keep adding features and functions to the current IBM i operating system releases without in any way breaking compatibility with the hardware levels and application software that runs on them. But you have to be careful about falling behind with the Technology Refreshes.

  To be specific, as we explain in the TR tab in the IBM i PTF Guide, while the Technology Refresh updates do not happen that often, but when they do, this tab has all of the information that system …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 8

  March 1, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  It pays to be regular when it comes to systems management, and it is not a good thing to get too far behind. Take Windows Server as an example. With tens of millions of customers and plenty of bugs and security patches for this target-rich environment, Microsoft has to do everything in its power to try to keep the Windows installed base – both servers and PCs – patched and secured.

  Windows Update can be used to automatically apply patches as they come out in the wake of Patch Tuesday once a month, or customers can set up a dedicated …

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• Security Awareness: Eight More Patches For IBM i Vulns

  February 27, 2017 Alex Woodie

  National security awareness month isn’t until October, but that didn’t stop IBM from issuing a torrent of patches this month to address all kinds of security problems in its products. For IBM i specifically, Big Blue patched eight flaws found across the OpenSSH and OpenSSL libraries for the three IBM i OSes under support. The Power HMC also received numerous security patches, as did dozens of other IBM products.

  OpenSSL and OpenSSH have been the source of numerous security vulnerabilities over the past three years, ever since the Heartbleed flaw was found in OpenSSL. As more flaws are found in …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 7

  February 22, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  It has been a fairly quiet week in PTF Land, and that is reasonable considering that IBM has accelerated the ramp of its Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3 and is getting them out the door well ahead of the normal April-May spring cleaning for these updates.

  As we told you last week, there are several WebSphere Application Server release levels that are covered in various IBM i releases. The idea behind a Program Temporary Fix, which is what PTF stands for, is that when you take the PTF and put it on your system, it fixes the …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 6

  February 15, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  Every two weeks, IBM updates the High Impact and Pervasive, or HIPER, PTFs that are so critical to the system that in Big Blue’s opinion they should be on every system as quickly as possible. In general, any HIPER PTF that affects any operating system releases is fixed as long as support for that IBM i release is still on support.

  In the example below, from this week, the three problems are fixed on all three current IBM releases, that being 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. The interesting part here is that OpenSSH 6.9 is vulnerable and that vulnerability is fixed …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 5

  February 8, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  For the past nineteen years now, Doug Bidwell, the PTF slinger who owns IBM midrange business partner DLB Systems Associates, has been putting together a guide to help OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i shops figure out what to patch in their operating systems for midrange gear every week.

  For as long as we can remember — and that is not long as we are getting a bit gray or white, depending — we have been publishing Bidwell’s IBM i PTF Guide, and we are thrilled to be getting it back on press and to be incorporating it into the …

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