• Four Hundred Monitor, March 16

  March 16, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  Hopefully you are pleased to see Four Hundred Monitor back from its brief hiatus. We are definitely pleased to be back, and we have lots of news to share, including a bunch of new listings in the Calendar at the bottom of the page. But enough with the chit chat for now. Let’s get caught up on what’s happening in and around the IBM i ecosystem.

  Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

  (Fast Company) IBM makes Fast Company’s list of the most innovative companies of 2022.

  (WRAL Tech Wire) IBM consolidates locations in New York City.

  (Business Insider) Russia warns …

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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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• Fresche Takes On IBM i Security With Trinity Guard Acquisition

  March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are things that you worry about that you can’t do anything about, and there are things that you worry about that you actually can do something about – and have a fiduciary responsibility to do. Death and taxes are in the former category, and the security of mission-critical IT platforms are in the latter.

  Fresche Solutions, which expanded from its core application and database modernization business with the acquisition of Abacus Solutions last October, has been on the hunt to do more deals to help IBM i customers tackle the hard problems they face and give them new …

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• Thoroughly Modern: IBM i Security Is No Longer Set It And Forget It

  March 14, 2022 Amal Macdonald

  For most IBM i shops, who are busy creating and maintaining the applications that run the business and who are not just chronically understaffed but structurally understaffed, the smartest thing they can do when it comes to security is give up.

  You heard that right. They need to put their arms in the air and surrender, absolutely and completely.

  No, we don’t mean they need to open all of the ports on their server, turn off the firewall, and let the ransomware and malware in and let the hackers and phishers do whatever they will. What we do mean by …

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• Prepping For Supply Chain Crunches with Manhattan Associates

  March 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  As the provider of the warehouse management software used by many of the top brands in the country, Manhattan Associates has a better view into the current supply chain crunch than most. That shouldn’t surprise you. But what may surprise you are the actions the company has been taking for years to prepare itself and its customers for shocks not unlike the current one.

  “We’ve been really busy the last five or six years cooking up some pretty cool new things,” says Adam Kline, senior director of product management at Manhattan Associates. Kline is the product manager for WMi, …

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• IBM Brings OpenShift Cluster Management Native On Power Iron

  March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you went out to GitHub and grabbed the source code for the Kubernetes cloud controller, you could compile it in C/C++ or set up the runtimes for the Python chunks of it, and you would probably find some Go buried in there and you could the toolchain and get the raw Kubernetes to work on Linux partitions; you might even be able to get it to run natively on AIX, and if you were really clever, you might even be able to get it to run on IBM i.

  But you wouldn’t have very much that was useful given …

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• Log4j Security Hole Found In OmniFind Text Search Server

  March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Who would have thought that a logging utility written in Java and available for more than two decades could cause so much trouble? But that is the nature of the Log4j security vulnerability, which has been installed in all kinds of systems software and which had a Log4Shell vulnerability that was discovered by Chinese computing giant Alibaba on November 24 last year and that was revealed to the world on December 9 as a zero-day vulnerability.

  There are several areas of the IBM i software stack that use the Log4j logging utility, which is one of the many Apache open …

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• IBM i Salaries: Underpaid, Yet Highly Valued And Hard To Replace

  March 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a funny old world. In many cases, the applications that are running on the IBM i platforms of the world are trapped in a kind of time warp and so are the people who created and who maintain them. This is the only plausible explanation for the fact that salaries in the IBM i real world also seem to be in a time warp. And here we are riding up a huge wave of inflation, in something of a war footing thanks to COVID and the war in Ukraine, and it is not yet clear to any of …

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• IBM i High Availability: A Met Need?

  March 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Data from the IBM i Marketplace Survey suggests an interesting phenomenon may be playing out when it comes to high availability and disaster recovery: As the usage of HA solutions goes up, the percentage of users expressing concerns about HA and DR goes down.

  After peaking at 66 percent in HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2020, the percentage of IBM i users declaring high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) a concern has dropped each of the past two years. For the 2022 survey, which was released last month, only 59 percent of survey participants declared HA/DR to be a …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 1 – Object Authority Check And Batch Job Performance

  March 7, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  Batch processes are perennial in virtually all kinds of business processing. From time to time, customers have to deal with batch runs that take too long, and many factors influence run time. One such factor in IBM i is how you assign object authority access rights for user profiles to the libraries and objects that are accessed by batch jobs. The importance of this factor can be found in the following case study.

  Many years ago, a customer asked me to determine why batch run time took too long. The customer ran 25 concurrent batch jobs in the batch process …

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