• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 7

  February 13, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  This week brought more security vulnerabilities in the airspace above us, and also around the world with weird sightings in the United States, Canada, China, and Russia. Now we have security vulnerabilities in open source code that is part of the IBM i stack.

  First, we have a Security Bulletin. IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime for IBM i are vulnerable to bypassing security restrictions, denial of service attacks, and data integrity impacts due to multiple vulnerabilities, which you can find out more about at this link. There are fixes as shown below by IBM i release and …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 5

  January 30, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Here’s a question for you: Are you using encryption to download software fixes from IBM? You may not know, and worse yet, you may not know how to figure that out. This is important because as we warned you last fall, IBM’s Electronic Fix Distribution and Fix Central systems will end support for unencrypted fix downloads starting on February 15 of this year.

  That gives you two weeks and a day to figure it out. And this document from IBM helps you figure it out and tells you what to do.

  Aside from this, it has been pretty quiet in …

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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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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 34

  August 22, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  New defective PTFs – meaning PTFs to fix bugs in PTFs that should not be there to fix bugs in software that should not have been there in the first place – issued this week by IBM, and we are only now seeing that you could have been misinterpreting the meaning of “defective PTFs” all of these years. It is to fix defects in PTFs, as some of you might not be thinking. Language is not as good at communication as we sometimes give it credit for. There is always some ambiguity in the packets that are exchanged when two …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 21

  May 25, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Not to give you any work to do, but I am going to give you some work to do. There is a new service pack for system firmware level MH1010, and this service pack, which you can read about here, addresses a HIPER issue. Next, compression with the ZLIB algorithm with Geographic Mirroring synchronization is coming soon! You can find out more about it at this link. And finally, check out the infrastructure changes that are coming to IBM Electronic Fix Distribution / IBM Fix Central system, which might necessitate customer firewall and proxy setting changes, which you …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 17

  April 27, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  It was a pretty quiet week in PTF Land, which stands to reason given the various holidays and the Spring Break that a lot of people had last week. It probably won’t last long, so take the downtime while you have it. There is stuff you need to deal with, of course.

  One reminder: A new build for Access Client Services (ACS) 1.1.9.0 is available for download (2170).

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

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs
  • Security
  • Backup Recovery Solutions
  • TCP/IP
  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • HIPERs
  • Security
  • Backup

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 12

  March 23, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  And the security vulnerabilities just keep on a-coming. This time, it is with the WebSphere Application Server. Check out Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty are vulnerable to Clickjacking (CVE-2021-39038), which you can read all about here. The affected products are WebSphere Application Server Liberty, versions 17.0.0.3 through 22.0.0.2 and WebSphere Application Server versions 9.0 through 9.0.5.11.

  Also, here some information: The default location of ACS is updated whenever there is a Cumulative update or upgrade to a OS level. (\\&SystemName\root\QIBM\ProdData\Access\ACS\Base). Here are fixes for this:

  • IBM i 7.4: SI77377 – ACS 1.1.8.8

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 11

  March 16, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  This Log4j security vulnerability just keeps being more and more pesky. If you haven’t seen it yet, there is an update to a Security Bulletin called Due to use of Apache Log4j, OmniFind Text Search Server for DB2 for i is vulnerable to arbitrary code execution (CVE-2021-4104), which you can read all about at this link.

  The patches for each release are described in full here:

  OmniFind V1R5M0:

  • SI78753
  • SI78754
  • SI78755

  OmniFind V1R4M0

  • SI78756
  • SI78757
  • SI78758

  OmniFind V1R3M0

  • SI78751
  • SI78759
  • SI78760
  • SI78761

  To help you with the Log4j security vulnerability, we have created a supplemental spreadsheet as a companion …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 9

  February 28, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, and we start off with this notice from the support people at IBM, which indicates that a HIPER PTF patch may include longer Abnormal IPL times during C9002C20 SNADS recovery. We also wanted to point out that we have added two new tabs to the Guide, QMGtools and ACS-Navigator for i. These are links we have found when troubleshooting and are useful for a more global look at those products.

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

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