Shield Advanced Systems Archives

Shield Delivers Monitoring Solution for FTP on IBM i

June 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

Shield Advanced Solutions last month delivered FT4i, a new utility that helps to secure File Transfer Protocol (FTP) activity on IBM i. The new tool not only controls who is allowed to use FTP, but also logs all FTP activity to uncover possibly criminal activity after the fact.

FTP is one of the most heavily used Internet protocols in the world. Across every industry, organizations use FTP to send and receive what is likely petabytes worth of data every single day. If the Internet is a “super highway,” then FTP is the 20-lane workhorse of an Interstate freeway, facilitating information …
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Shield Adds HMC, Security PTFs to Nagios Monitoring Solution

March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie

If you’d like to know what’s going on with your Hardware Management Console (HMC), you can do so through the updated Nagios offering from Shield Advanced Solutions. Version 2.1 of the company’s bundled AAG and NG4i offering also will automatically notify you when IBM has submitted security PTFs for the operating system or licensed products, and even download them for you.

After initially trying to use IBM’s open source Nagios software to monitor their customers’ high availability software environments, the folks at Shield Advanced Solutions took it upon themselves to develop their own Nagios distribution for the IBM i server, …
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Everybody Needs Monitoring On The IBM i

October 18, 2023 Chris Hird

If you are running a software business, you can never go wrong by listening to the customer and then providing what they want.

Our journey into being an adjunct for the open source Nagios system monitoring tool began when we had a client that wanted to monitor multiple LPAR instances being backed up by our high availability software, HA4i, from a single pane of glass. At the time, we had a PHP interface for our HA4i tool, and we really did not want to rewrite all of that just to be able to give this customer that single pane …
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Shield Builds on Success with Nagios for IBM i

September 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

Traditional system monitoring tools on IBM i are valuable, but they have one big downside: They often require an operator to sit there and stare at the screen to detect when things go wrong. “That gets old very quickly,” says Chris Hird, the Shield Advanced Solutions director who found an alternative approach in Nagios.

Nagios is unique among monitoring tools – at least in the IBM i world – in that it actively runs checks for a variety of systems on monitored machines on a continuous basis. It is constantly pinging target server (and network and storage devices) to check …
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Shield Debuts Nagios Monitoring Solution for IBM i

December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

Shield Advanced Solutions last week rolled out a new system monitoring solution based on open-source Nagios technology that gives customers quick insight into the state of their IBM i server. Dubbed AAG, for At A Glance, the product currently monitor 65 IBM i parameters, and can be used with existing Nagios deployments running on Linux or deployed in a standalone manner with an included Linux runtime.

Nagios is a free open-source software project that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, networking devices, applications, and other IT gear. The software was originally developed in 2002 to monitor Linux systems, and over …
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Shield Launches Message Monitoring Offering for IBM i

August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

IBM i professionals should stay on top of important messages generated by their server. But sometimes can be difficult for a user to sign-in on a console. With Enterprise Monitoring Solution for IBM i, or EM4i, Shield Advanced Solutions is giving operators and administrators the capability to view messages and log files remotely via email, text, or push notifications, and to respond to them, too.

EM4i monitors IBM i message queues and job logs on behalf of the user. When a message hits the log, EM4i automatically forwards it to the user as email, text, or via Pushover Notification, …
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Shield Finds Success Through Simplicity With HA4i

February 15, 2017 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that have shied away from implementing high availability software due the high level of complexity may want to take another look at the market. One HA vendor that’s finding traction with its message of simplicity is Shield Advanced Solutions, which has about 100 customers of its C-based HA4i product.

High availability doesn’t have to be rocket science, according to Shield CEO Chris Hird, who has been navigating the HA waters since his early days selling MIMIX for IBM in the United Kingdom during the 1990s, before MIMIX was acquired by Lakeview Technology (now part of Vision …
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Shield Delivers Monitoring Solution for FTP on IBM i

Shield Adds HMC, Security PTFs to Nagios Monitoring Solution

Everybody Needs Monitoring On The IBM i

Shield Builds on Success with Nagios for IBM i

Shield Debuts Nagios Monitoring Solution for IBM i

Shield Launches Message Monitoring Offering for IBM i

Shield Finds Success Through Simplicity With HA4i

Content archive

Recent Posts

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