• IBM To Stop Unencrypted Fix Downloads In February

  November 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have caught word from the IBM business partner community that starting on February 15, 2023, Big Blue will stop allowing customers to get operating system software patches that are not encrypted.

  The notification, which you can see here, was sent to business partners on November 23, just before the Thanksgiving Day holiday in the United States. Various IBM support methods, including IBM Electronic Fix Distribution (EFD), IBM Electronic Customer Care (ECC), and IBM Fix Central are all affected by this change.

  “Many leaders of the internet industry – such as World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Engineering Task …

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• Pandora FMS Log Monitoring Solution Gets IBM i Hooks

  September 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Pandora FMS, an open source log monitoring solution that has been in use for decades, is being integrated with IBM i, the software’s commercial backer announced last week. Thanks to a partnership between Pandora FMS and the French company M81, organizations that use the software can add IBM i into the monitoring mix.

  Pandora FMS, short for Flexible Monitoring System, is an open source tool for consuming and analyzing server and network logs. The utility, which was written in PHP and runs on Linux, uses agents (developed in Perl) to keep an eye on servers running Linux, Windows, and Unix …

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• Guru: IBM i *USRPRF Security

  May 23, 2022 Bruce Bading

  IBM i has long enjoyed a reputation of being one of the most securable application servers in the industry. IBM i object encapsulation or object-oriented architecture achieves a level of technology integrity not found in file-based systems such as Unix, Linux, and Windows – as long as QSECUTY is set to 40 or 50.

  This advanced technology however does not exclude the IBM i from security risks if your development teams are not practicing (DevSecOps | CSRC (nist.gov)) and (Zero Trust Architecture | NIST).

  Let me remind what one of the lead signatories on the Agile …

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• IBM Preconfigures Power System Racks Running Oracle Database

  January 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are one of the suppliers who still sells Unix and Linux servers for supporting back-end relational databases or platforms that compete against Unix and Linux iron, then Oracle is something you have to contend with either directly or indirectly. As the dominant database platform for running ERP, CRM, SCM, and other applications, you have to partner with Oracle even if you have to compete against the company.

  The good news is that at least Oracle no longer is selling big iron machinery based on the Solaris Unix and the Sparc processors that the company acquired when it bought …

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• In The API World, Nobody Knows You Are An IBM i

  August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

  Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. …

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• How IBM i Fits Into a Zero-Trust Security Framework

  July 19, 2021 Alex Woodie

  One of the hot new trends in cybersecurity these days is the zero-trust security model. Instead of implicitly trusting network traffic behind the firewall, zero-trust demands that traffic have explicit permission to be there. But how does that model work with the strange beast known as IBM i? IT Jungle recently sat down with PJ Kirner, the CTO and co-founder of zero-trust software provider Illumio, to find out.

  Illumio is an eight-year-old venture-backed startup based in Sunnyvale, California, that is working in the field of zero-trust security. It develops an offering, called Illumio Core, that allows companies to begin implementing …

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• Ransomware Attacks Hit Closer To Home

  July 12, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Fifteen hundred organizations around the world had their data locked up in the latest ransomware attack, including grocery store chains and schools. It’s unclear if any IBM i shops were included in the attack, which a Russian hacking group claimed credit for. But it’s clear that ransomware is a growing threat to all organizations, including IBM i shops.

  On July 2, as hundreds of millions of Americans hunkered down for the long Independence Day holiday weekend, hackers using the REvil were just getting started. The Russian-affiliated hacking group had already done the hard work of exploiting a five-year-old security flaw …

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• In Search of Multi-Modal Data Integration

  May 5, 2021 Alex Woodie

  As the number of data sources that companies use goes up, so too does the complexity of the data pipelines that bring it all together. Instead of using a mix of different tools and technologies for ETL, ELT, and batch integration, some users are seeking a single multi-modal data integration tool that can deliver multiple integration approaches.

  One company providing multi-modal data integration is Equalum. The company’s DataOps offering works in various methodologies, including capturing real-time database updates using change data capture (CDC) technology; batch-based extract, transform, and load (ETL) and ELT; and REST- and SOAP-based data integration using …

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• Crazy Idea Number 615: Variable Priced Power Systems Partitions

  April 5, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you stare down the blank page as much as I have in my career, you learn to not be afraid of that blank page. If you look at it long enough – usually for only a few minutes – ideas flip into existence like quantum particles spinning their curlicues. Most of them are silly, some are utterly useless, but eventually you get one that is worth following to see where it might go.

  So it is with an idea that popped into my head, which was a daydream about IBM creating variable priced partitions on the Power Systems machines. …

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• Guru: Web Services, DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN, Part 1

  April 5, 2021 Jon Paris

  Many of the “Can you help me with. . . ” communications that cross my desk these days include reference to JSON. Sometimes the questioner is receiving JSON in a file, or has to retrieve it from a web service, or needs to generate JSON in response to a query. While there are many ways to handle these requirements, RPG’s built-in DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you and are quite simple once you understand the basics.

  In this series of tips, I am going to start with a basic example that uses both …

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