• Getting A Firm Handle On Power Systems And Storage Firmware

  June 15, 2022 Richard Warren

  Back in the old days of the AS/400 and the iSeries, most customers had a single box or maybe two, one for production applications and databases and one for development of high availability. And everything that box needed was inside of itself.

  And at most, you applied two kinds of PTFs – those for the operating system and those for the microcode – to the machine, and you did that maybe once or twice a year and every once in a while you might add some group PTFs to update security or other important features.

  But the world has changed …

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• LUG Looks to Grow Membership

  June 1, 2022 Alex Woodie

  If you work at a large IBM i shop and are interested in having more of a say in the direction of the platform, then you might be interested in joining the influential Large User Group (LUG). And as luck would have it, the group, which is meeting in Rochester next week for the first time in three years, has several openings in its rolls and is looking for new members.

  LUG got its start back in 1994, when IT executives from six big AS/400 shops got together at a COMMON conference and realized they had a common set of …

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• Log4j Hits Heritage Version of Navigator for i – No Patch Coming

  January 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops running the old version of the Navigator for i client should be aware that the software is vulnerable to the Log4j security vulnerability, and there will be no patch to fix it, IBM says in a new security bulletin. There will, however, be fixes coming to other vulnerable components, including IWS, IAS, and IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS), IBM says.

  Just before we hit the holiday break, the extremely severe Apache Log4j security vulnerability was disclosed to the world, resulting in a frantic effort to patch servers, desktops, refrigerators – just about anything with a …

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• Guru: Physical System Performance

  November 15, 2021 Dawn May

  Almost all IBM i shops use logical partitioning and have several partitions on a single Powerbox. There may be several IBM i partitions, VIOS partitions, and possibly AIX or Linux on Power partitions. Regardless of what type of operating system is running in the partition, the hypervisor collects performance metrics for all partitions. These performance metrics are always being collected, and you can allow a partition access to these performance metrics. In the case of IBM i, this physical system performance data can be gathered by Collection Services. IBM documents this feature in Collecting and displaying CPU utilization for all …

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• Systems Software Stack Gets A Refresh With Power10

  September 20, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When there is new server hardware, the systems software stack needs to be tweaked to support it and to take better advantage of it. And that is also a perfect time to add new features to the systems software that can be supported on older iron. (But not too old or customers will never move forward. . . . )

  And so it is with the various core systems software – PowerVM, PowerVC, PowerSC, and the HMC – that runs atop Power Systems machinery and either alongside of or underneath the IBM i operating system and the IBM i Technology …

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• IBM Tweaks Power Systems Hardware Here And There

  April 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  First of all, our apologies for taking so long to get to the hardware roundup from the April 13 Power Systems announcements, which brought us new Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4. There were a few changes to the hardware lineup as well, and let’s go through them now.

  As you can see from announcement letter 121-013, IBM has done a refresh on the 2.5-inch flash drives used in the Power9-based server line. According to Douglas Gibbs, offering manager for peripherals at the Cognitive Systems division that is responsible for the Power Systems lineup, this …

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• Big Blue Unveils Spring 2021 IBM i Technology Refreshes

  April 12, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM tomorrow will announce the latest round of Technology Refreshes (TRs) for the current versions of the operating systems. With IBM i 7.4 TR4 and 7.3 TR10, IBM is focusing its efforts on extending automation across various components of the operating system, including the database, security, and high availability. But a surprise also awaits IBM i enthusiasts who are visually inclined.

  IBM gave IT Jungle a preview of the announcements that will go public tomorrow, and (very kindly) gave us permission to cover them in today’s issue of The Four Hundred. That means that the announcement materials will not …

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• OpenShift Provides One Path To IBM i Modernization

  March 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The crown jewel in IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat arguably is OpenShift, which is a Kubernetes-based container management system for running “cloud-native” applications. While it’s unlikely OpenShift will ever integrate directly with IBM i and its applications, IBM has high hopes the software will help usher in a new wave of application modernization and innovation among IBM i customers.

  IBM Power engineer Joe Cropper laid out the case for IBM i shops to get going with OpenShift two weeks ago during the IBM i Futures conference, which was hosted by COMMON. Cropper, you will remember, made a …

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• Sometimes Folks Only Learn The Hard Way About Keeping Software Current

  February 1, 2021 Rob McNelly

  School’s been out for me for a very long time, but I still enjoy learning. I gain a sense of satisfaction whenever I learn something new. Specific to technology, exposure to new concepts helps me understand how things work together. I cannot count the number of times where I watched over someone’s shoulder, or watched someone on a shared screen, to learn about a new tool or technique, or a different way to set up my desktop or environment.

  Watching and listening to people is my preferred way to learn, but other forms of education – reading IBM Redbooks and …

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• Security Vulnerability In VIOS, AIX, And Maybe IBM i

  November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM i shops that use the Virtual I/O Server, which is a cut-down version of the AIX implementation of Unix created by Big Blue, have to be aware that there is a security vulnerability that affects recent releases of AIX and VIOS.

  The vulnerability, announced in Security Vulnerability CVE-2020-4788, affects Power9 machinery running VIOS 3.1 or AIX 7.1 and AIX 7.2, and under what are called “extenuating circumstances” the vulnerability could allow a local user on the system to obtain sensitive information stored on the L1 cache on the Power9 cores.

  The vulnerability was reported on November 18, and …

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