• Spooky New Security Vulns Lurking on IBM i

  November 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Halloween has come and gone, but the scares will stick around for a while for IBM i administrators, who have been given more than a dozen fixes by IBM to address some pretty serious security vulnerabilities recently revealed in the heart of the operating system, including in spooky old friends Java and OpenSSL.

  On October 27, IBM issued a security bulletin for two CVEs, including CVE-2023-40685 and CVE-2023-40686, which describe two separate but related security flaws in the Management Central component of IBM i Navigator in IBM i versions 7.2 through 7.5.

  The first privilege escalation vulnerability, CVE-2023-40685, could …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 44

  October 30, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Last week was busy, and this week is quiet when it comes to PTFs. With the release of Technology Refreshes coming out starting to roll out next week, this stands to reason.

  Now, a note about the ESS Outage. Due to extensive infrastructure upgrades, the ESS website and all of its components, including Base Composer and Cloud Management Console functions, will be fully unavailable from November 3, 2023, at 11 a.m. UTC until November 6, 2023, at 3 a.m. UTC.

  Now, there is also a security vulnerability, which you can read about in Security Bulletin: IBM i is vulnerable to …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 43

  October 23, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Busy, busy, busy. That is what the good people at IBM Rochester have been in the past week, with a slew of PTFs for the currently supported releases – that is IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.4 that are on standard support and IBM i 7.3 that just went into extended support at the end of September, a trio of security vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack, and two group PTFs for the IBM i 7.2 release that is supposed to be kaput.

  Let’s start with the security vulnerabilities.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is vulnerable to …

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• Tech Refreshes Bring SQL-Based Services Galore For IBM i and Db2

  October 16, 2023 Alex Woodie

  With the latest Technology Refreshes, IBM unleashed another round of new and updated IBM i Services aimed simplifying life for administrators, developers, and other IBM i professionals. The company also refreshed its slate of Db2 for i Services.

  Over the past decade, IBM has been busy rejiggering how users interact with core components of the operating system. Instead of issuing traditional CL commands or working with low-level APIs, users can tap into new SQL-based IBM i services via Access Client Solutions (ACS) to accomplish the same tasks.

  Db2 for i Database Architect Scott Forstie and his team have created hundreds …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 42

  October 16, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome back to work this week. IBM i 7.2 has two new PTF groups even though it has been in extended support from Big Blue since April 30, 2021. The IBM i 7.2 release is still on extended support until April 30, 2024, which is why the security and HIPER group PTFs have been updated for this release. Specifically, that is:

  • SF99718 720 Group Security – level 124, which you can find out more about here.
  • SF99719 720 Group HIPER – level 235, which you can find out more about there.

  As we reported last week in The …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 41

  October 9, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Here is something interesting. There is a new cume for IBM i 7.3, just after it goes out of standard support and is now on extended support. For years, we have been after IBM to put a cume out when it stops supporting a release, kind of a summation at end of life. This is the first time Big Blue has managed to do that.

  It is likely a coincidence, but it should have always been policy. It is difficult to round up docs and PTFs for an end of life product two years after the fact. Having a stake …

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• Power10 Upgrade Considerations You Need to be Aware Of

  October 4, 2023 Steve Pitcher

  It has been over a year since Power10 servers have been available from IBM. After many conversations, configurations, proposals, installations, and project debriefs, I wanted to use this article as a point of reflection on some of the nuances around Power10 and the End of Service dates for IBM i 7.3 and Power8 hardware.

  Let’s just jump right into it because we are all busy.

  First: A hardware change is most often used to facilitate the upgrade path to a newer version of the IBM i operating system.

  The Power8 servers top out at supporting IBM i 7.4. They’re …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 40

  October 2, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  In case you have been sleeping under a rock, or under an apple tree, or under a bridge, the IBM i 7.3 operating system release reached its end of standard support this Saturday on September 30. So now if you plan to keep IBM i 7.3 in production, you have to pay for an extended support Software Maintenance contract with Big Blue. You also have to do the math on whether it is worth it to hang back or to move to IBM i 7.5, which has been generally available since May 2022.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups …

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• DR Testing As A Service: One More Thing That You Don’t Have To Do

  September 25, 2023 David Fahrenkrug

  If not having a disaster recovery plan for your IBM i system is scary to think about – and clearly a lot of IBM i shops are not thinking about it beyond restoring from tape or virtual tape library because if they did, they would get together a disaster recovery plan – then maybe between the fifth and tenth most scary things in the datacenter today is actually making sure that the disaster recovery software works and the plan for recovery in the event of something going haywire actually works.

  High availability clustering and disaster recovery software is, by necessity, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 39

  September 25, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  This is not new news, but recurring news. IBM has once again pushed the implementation date of an IP change for tech support out a couple of times, and, here it is again. IBM’s notice:

  “Due to technical issues, the September 19/20 change has been postponed. Additional guidance will be provided by October 6, 2023. For those that have adjusted their firewall configuration, please do not remove the new entries until we provide further guidance. Preparing customer firewalls and proxies for the upcoming infrastructure changes – Call Home, Electronic Fix Distribution.”

  You can find out more about this issue, which …

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