• Four Hundred Monitor, February 23

  February 23, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  One of the things we like about Monitor, in addition to having the opportunity to share a selection of news items we think might be of interest or entertainment to our readers, is this weekly column gives us the opportunity to watch for trends in our ecosystem and the ones around us. Since the year began, and especially in the last few weeks, it has been exciting to watch our Calendar filling up with opportunities to learn and connect. There is something for everyone, with in-person and online events, and we like to think it’s an indication of the health …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 8

  February 23, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Wake up! There is a new security vulnerability in the Java stack within IBM i. See Security Bulletin: IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime for IBM i are affected by CVE-2021-234, which you can read at this link. The IBM i Group PTF numbers containing the fix for the CVE follows. Future Group PTFs for Java will also contain the fix for this CVE:

  • Release 7.4: SF99665 level 13
  • Release 7.3: SF99725 level 24
  • Release 7.2: SF99716 level 34

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

  Read more

• Global COBOL Growth Spurs Reevaluation of ‘Legacy’ Assets

  February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  COBOL is supposed to be a dead language, tied (mostly) as it is to the IBM mainframe, which is also dead. But according to a recent survey from Micro Focus, the amount of COBOL code in the world actually is expanding. What in COBOL is going on?

  Micro Focus commissioned the research group Vanson Bourne to evaluate the state of COBOL use in the world, and the results of that research were released on February 4. Perhaps the most eye-popping figure references the title of the report, “How much COBOL is really out there?”

  The answer: Anywhere from 775 to …

  Read more

• Infor Customers Share IBM i Stories

  February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Infor is often disparaged for being a graveyard of IBM i ERP products. But at the recent Inforum Digital event, three Infor customers shared why they’re bullish on their IBM i ERP systems from Infor.

  Badger Meters is a publicly traded manufacturer of water meters based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The 115-year-old company has more than 1,600 employees and has relied on Infor ERP LX system and BPCS predecessors to automate its operations for many years.

  According to Jim Reinardy, the director of information systems for Badger Meters, ERP LX has met the company’s needs, which has included a number of …

  Read more

• IBM Launches Ansible On Power Solution

  February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week officially announced the Ansible Automation Platform is available for Power servers. The offering brings certified endpoint collection modules for IBM i, AIX, and Linux running on Power.

  Ansible was originally developed to be a lightweight and reliable configuration management system for servers, applications, networks, containers, security, and the cloud. The software, which Red Hat acquired in 2015 (before Red Hat was subsequently snapped up by IBM), was designed to model customers’ IT infrastructure and manage it with an agentless approach.

  The primary interface that administrators use to define actions with Ansible are playbooks based on YAML files. …

  Read more

• Four Hundred Monitor, February 16

  February 16, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  Some of you may be noticing a need for a chief data officer within your organization, although it appears to be more common to see that role added to an existing employee’s responsibilities. The task of creating business value from data isn’t as easy as it might sound, but it is something nearly every organization would like to do. This week, we’re sharing an article about what to look for in a CDO, as well as a link to the page of IBM’s CDO, which should offer some food for thought if that’s a position you, or your company, is …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 7

  February 16, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  To help you deal with the Log4j security vulnerability, we have created a supplemental spreadsheet as a companion to the IBM i PTF Guide that has the latest information on what you need to worry about and do about it when it comes to this vulnerability.

  You can down the Log4j spreadsheet at this link.

  And just a reminder that there is a new version of Navigator for i, which you can find out more about at this link. This modern user interface can be accessed from http://hostname:2002/Navigator.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i …

  Read more

• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part One: The Operating System

  February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You probably already figured this out, but we love data here at The Four Hundred, and we are always particularly keen on any data that helps us to understand the IBM i ecosystem better. And that is why we always look forward to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey report that comes out in January each year from HelpSystems, and because we are thankful for the data they gather, we help push the survey every year and also participate in the webinar for it as well as a donation to the IBM i community.

  IT Jungle co-editor Alex Woodie …

  Read more

• Thoroughly Modern: Taking Charge of Your Hardware Refresh in 2022

  February 14, 2022 Peder Lundblad

  IBM i shops are well known for paying a premium for their systems because they are worth it, but they are also just as well known for hanging onto aging hardware a bit past its prime, which has its own kinds of economic costs in higher maintenance and operational costs as well as the risk of a failure in some key component of the hardware or of having an older operating system release that does not have a key security vulnerability or bug patched.

  IBM does a very good job of keeping hardware technology cycles regular, and so there is …

  Read more

• Guru: Backup to an NAS using RSYNC

  February 14, 2022 Dan Devoe

  Like many small shops, we use a simple tape drive to backup most of our libraries and the contents of the IFS. Each workday, the tape would be changed and the previous tape taken home by someone in IT in case of a disaster.

  But then, COVID hit – there was no one in the office to switch tapes and the same tape was being used to perform nightly backups. What if we discovered a problem with the data from two nights ago? Ordinarily, we would restore one or more libraries or files from the appropriate tape.

  I set up …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles