• Samba Patch Caps Busy Year for IBM i Security

  December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week patched a moderately severe security flaw in IBM i’s Samba implementation that could enable hackers to access data they really shouldn’t be able to access. The disclosure caps a rather busy second half of the year for security patches on IBM i that saw 26 emergency PTFs and Yum updates for Node.js, Python, the Apache HTTP Server, OpenSSL, ISC Bind, IBM Navigator, and even Db2 Mirror for IBM i.

  On November 26, IBM issued this security bulletin to let people know about the new flaw in the Samba client. The flaw could allow a hacker to not …

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• Latest TRs For IBM i Now Available

  November 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week delivered the latest IBM i operating system Technology Refreshes, giving good IBM i boys and girls around the world early Christmas presents in areas like programing, operations, database, and security. Here’s a quick recap of the new stuff in IBM i 7.4 TR1 and 7.3 TR7.

  There were several general enhancements with IBM i 7.4 TR1 and 7.3 TR7. For starters, administrators gained more control over resources available to the Integrated Web Server (the one powered by Apache) with the new capability to install it the Web server in a user-specified sub-system. Admins also get new functions …

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• Revenge Of The Zombie Green Screen

  October 30, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but command line interfaces – which were supposed to have been killed off years ago at the hands of superior graphical user interfaces (GUIs) – are making a comeback in the general IT scene. And the command line love appears to be spilling over into the IBM i.

  Command line interfaces, or CLIs, never completely disappeared from the scene. Even Windows 10 users can summon the dark magic of the DOS prompt with a few tactical clicks of the keyboard, mouse, or (God forbid) touchscreen. But like crazy uncles and credit card debt, the CLI has largely …

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• Digging Into the Latest IBM i TRs

  October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The fall batch of Technology Refreshes (TRs) have been revealed, and as expected, there’s a bit of new functionality available for customers who use IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. In this story, we’ll tackle enhancements in open source, systems management and monitoring, and development, which means we’ll dive deeper into other areas, like database and HA/DR, in a future story.

  Let’s start with the fun stuff: open source. With IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1, IBM has brought support for two prominent open source projects, including ZeroMQ and Redis.

  ZeroMQ is a universal messaging library that allows users to …

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• What’s New With IBM i Customer Support

  September 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM is making big changes to its support program that will have a major impact on how IBM i customers interact with Big Blue, for both software and hardware support. Two weeks ago it announced that IBM i customers would be switched over from the old IBM Service Request tool to the new IBM My Support site. IBM is also expanding support for open source software on IBM i.

  IBM has been testing the new IBM Support site, www.ibm.com/mysupport, for over a year for various customer groups and geographies. On September 14, the company announced that it was cutting …

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• Guru: Enumerated Data Types In RPG

  September 16, 2019 Ted Holt

  IT has changed a lot since I entered the field several decades ago, but some things have not changed. I would read in those early days that COBOL was dead, and I read the same thing now. Yet COBOL is 60 years old and still going strong. Back then I heard RPG criticized as “Real Poor Garbage”. These days I hear it scorned as “legacy”, which I assume is supposed to mean the same thing. Yet today’s RPG is better than any of its predecessors for business programming.

  RPG supposedly does not have the features of modern languages. Maybe not, …

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• Guru: Passing Parameters To Python

  August 5, 2019 Mike Larsen

  Python scripts offer great benefits to developers, whether used standalone or in conjunction with RPG programs. As I’ve been exploring Python and recently I had a need to execute a Python script from an RPG program. In addition to executing the script, I also wanted to pass it parameters.

  One of the benefits of passing parameters is to give us the ability to soft-code programs or scripts. Soft-coding makes programs more flexible and re-usable, and helps to reduce maintenance.

  To illustrate how to do this, I’ve coded a very simple RPG program and an even simpler Python script. I’ll start …

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• Remain Breaks New Ground With ALM Suite

  July 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Coding season just ended for Remain Software, the Dutch application lifecycle management (ALM) vendor with a growing US presence. That means customers are sorting through a torrent of new functionality in its flagship TD/OMS product, including improved hooks to DevOps tools like Git and Jenkins, a new cross-platform cross-reference module, and a nifty API generator too.

  New stuff started emerging from Remain Software around the POWERUp conference in May, when IT Jungle sat down with company representatives to talk about development trends, current and upcoming releases of Remain’s software, and what customers are looking to get next.

  Arguably the biggest …

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• Guru: Finding Large Files With Python

  July 15, 2019 Mike Larsen

  It’s always a good idea to purge files that aren’t needed any longer. Chances are that you already have procedures in place to purge data from Db2 files and tables, but what about files that reside in the IFS? Do you have a good solution for keeping the IFS clean?

  Perhaps you have old order files stored in the IFS. If you work for a large company, these types of files can accumulate quickly. I’ve written processes in the past to remove files from the IFS using RPG, but I’d like to offer an alternative. I’m going to show how …

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• Eradani Bridges The Gap Between Legacy And Open Source

  July 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In this publication, legacy is not a dirty word or even remotely pejorative. Rather, “legacy” is just a shorthand way of delineating between applications that encapsulate decades of the evolution of a business and the transactions it processes, and all of the other new stuff that this business is also doing and perhaps coding with newer tools and programming languages.

  A new company, called Eradani, has been founded by some experts in both the IBM i world and the open source world with the express purpose of building a technical bridge so these two different cultures can see a …

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