• Avatier Bolsters Self-Service Password Reset with MFA

  April 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Self-service password reset cuts both ways. On one hand, users want convenient ways to reset passwords they invariably will forget. On the other, events like the recent MGM cyberattack show that more thorough user authentication is required. The folks at identity management solution provider Avatier think they have come up with a novel way to satisfy both camps – without getting cut in the process.

  You might not have heard about Avatier, but the Pleasanton, California, has been quietly serving the single sign-on (SSO) and identity management needs of IBM i shops for the past 24 years. It’s integrated …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: LightEdge Solutions

  December 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The nature of the IBM i market is changing as the nature of the IBM i installed base is changing. With skills in short supply – and getting shorter by the day – and the work piling higher and higher as companies try to tackle application modernization and integration, different ways of acquiring and consuming compute and storage, and modern data analytics and artificial intelligence, we are entering an age where managed service and cloud suppliers will usurp the position formerly held by the business partners who worked downstream from IBM peddling and supporting on-premises Power Systems machinery.

  Because variety …

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• 2023: An IBM i Year in Review

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  With another year nearly in the books, it’s time to take a stroll through the IT Jungle archives and reconsider some of the 728 stories we published in 2023. Here’s a look back at the biggest IBM i news stories of 2023.

  January

  The top concern of IBM i professionals, according to Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Study, was once again security, a position it has held for six straight years. The latest crop of IBM Champions unveiled in January featured about 90 members from the IBM i community, out of a total of 839 for the year. Is …

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• Rocket Launches CM-Kit for Continuous Modernization

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  You’ve read about continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI-CD. Now Rocket Software wants you think about a related topic called continuous modernization, which refers to an uninterrupted re-invention of your applications via Web enablement and APIs. It recently launched a new suite of software, called the Continuous Modernization Kit, to help customers deliver that on their IBM i servers.

  Web-enablement of greenscreen 5250 applications has been a thing since at least the late 1990s, when the dot-com boom drove the initial commercialization of the Internet. That was followed closely by mobile enablement, which Apple turbocharged with its 2007 launch …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, December 13

  December 13, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  This is the last issue of The Four Hundred for 2023. And while we are very excited for the break from the daily grind that is publishing, it is always bittersweet to say goodbye to another year. Our team remains grateful to be here, and for all of you who rely on us for news and insight into the IBM i ecosystem. Our editor, Tim Prickett Morgan, explains it best, and you can read his holiday message as our Top Story below. We hope you all enjoy the holiday season, and we look forward to reconnecting in the new year! …

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• Townsend Security Calls It Quits

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  After 40 years in business, Townsend Security will cease operations at the end of the month, the company’s principal, Patrick Townsend, announced last week. “It has been my honor to serve you and work with you for these many years, and I know that our security solutions have kept many safe from harm,” he wrote.

  Townsend Security traces its roots back to 1984, when Townsend created a consulting team to provide network and communications solutions for a global chipmaker, according to Patrick Townsend’s LinkedIn page. Townsend formally founded Townsend Security in 1991, and has served the IBM midrange community …

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• ACS, Merlin Hit With Serious Security Vulnerabilities

  December 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Three serious security vulnerabilities in IBM i Access Client Solutions and six in Merlin were disclosed and patched by IBM last week. The flaws could allow attackers to commit a range of crimes, from executing arbitrary code and denial of service attacks, to obtaining sensitive data on IBM i conducting phishing attacks. All of the flaws – including another three reported by IBM in November – should be patched immediately.

  IBM published a security bulletin December 8 covering all three of the ACS flaws, which impact ACS versions 1.1.2 through 1.1.4 and 1.1.4.3 through 1.1.9.3. The fix is to download …

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• Many Different Kinds Of Cloud, Very Big Piles Of Money

  December 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  From the very beginning, there have been many kinds of clouds. Yes, Amazon Web Services started out with the Simple Storage Service (S3) object storage service in March 2006, and quickly followed it up with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, and even though it cannot decide if service is part of a product name or not, AWS set the stage for how infrastructure services (IaaS) and then platform (PaaS) and application software (SaaS) services would be layered on top of raw, virtualized iron.

  Many observers thought that in the end, everything would go PaaS and SaaS and IaaS would …

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• Happy Holidays To You And Yours From Us And Ours

  December 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  First of all, thank you.

  It is a great privilege and an honor to do the work we do for the IBM i and Power Systems customer base and the software vendors, hardware sellers, and service providers who also serve customers like you. If history has demonstrated nothing else in the more than five decades of IBM midrange computing, it is that we are one single ecosystem, that we are all in this together and always have been.

  We did a little bit more content earlier this year, and so that means we can get our Christmas break a little …

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• As I See It: Riffing On Retirement

  December 11, 2023 Victor Rozek

  It didn’t take long after my father retired for him to start getting bored. There were suddenly lots of unstructured hours to fill and no prescribed way to fill them. So, he did what many retired men do: He stayed home and annoyed his wife. But after several months of straining my mother’s tolerance for togetherness, he settled on a novel solution.

  The back of our property was bordered by a very tall hedge which shaded portions of the lawn. During the rainy season the shaded areas never fully dried and became saturated. So my father decided to replace patches …

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