• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing Case 4 – Investigating Time-Sensitive Transaction Issues

  June 6, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  Among the central processing hardware resources in a computer system – CPU, GPU, memory, disk, PCI-Express I/O bus – disk has always been the slowest component. Even the latest flash disk or NVM-Express flash drive or card is slowest, but not by much. Back in the days of hard disk, disk I/O was the most popular cause of performance problems. From experience, I always looked at it first in my investigation.

  The modern SAN flash disk can still be the performance bottleneck when it is not deployed properly, as I shared in Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – …

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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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• Guru: IBM i Unauthenticated Access

  April 25, 2022 Bruce Bading

  One of the greatest threats to any network, host, or server is unauthenticated access where an attacker can gain local or remote access with no credentials that can lead to a Critical rating with the following descriptions (CVSS v3.1 User Guide (first.org).

  Confidentiality Impact Complete (There is total information disclosure, resulting in all system files being revealed.)

  Integrity Impact Complete (There is a total compromise of system integrity, and a complete loss of system protection resulting in the entire system being compromised.)

  Availability Impact Complete (There is a total shutdown of the affected resource. The attacker can render …

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• Guru: Debugging SQL Stored Procedures With ACS

  April 11, 2022 Mike Larsen

  I use Access Client Solutions (ACS) daily to help with different tasks. I’m usually running SQL scripts or working with the IFS, but recently I was asked if there was a way to debug SQL stored procedures using ACS. More specifically, they were looking for a way that a “non-IBM i” person can debug SQL stored procedures on IBM i.

  After browsing the various menus in Run SQL Scripts in ACS, I found a system debugger. I had seen the system debugger before, but never took the time to explore it further. With this new request in mind, I decided …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – When Performance Issues Come From Without

  April 4, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  When I started my IT career 35 years ago, it was in the “centralized” universe that originated from the mainframe model. All core application codes ran in one — and only one — big iron that all users accessed with “dumb” terminals devoid of any GUI. Problem solving in AS/400 systems was frequently straightforward and not time consuming because most cases were anything but elusive.

  But the contemporary IT infrastructure universe has evolved into a big onion, with layers that we must peel while troubleshooting. I often find myself having to address a problem in multiple layers, and it no …

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• Guru: SIEM Is Only Part Of IBM i Cybersecurity

  March 28, 2022 Bruce Bading

  Many times, we hear from IBM i business owners that their SIEM – that’s short for Security Information and Event Management – is their cybersecurity solution for the IBM i. But that can’t be true, and I want to explain why it is part of the security shield but certainly not all of it.

  Let’s start with SIEMs and how they fit into cybersecurity frameworks. SIEM is mentioned in the PCI appendix, but not once in the core of the 250+ PCI DSS requirements, likewise, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework lists event monitoring as one of the 100s (1/100s) of NIST …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 2 – Dealing With CPU Queuing Wait Time

  March 21, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  When we drive our cars, we hope to avoid red lights and traffic jams, because we all hate waiting immobile in traffic. I’m sure that you are aware, fully or subtly, that active jobs in any computer system can encounter wait as well. The IBM i developer team has categorized many types of wait.

  In this article, let’s look at CPU Queuing wait time. Let’s see how we can interpret and address it in a sensible way to resolve poor performance. I’ll try to provide you with a useful approach to wait time analysis using a gloriously useful performance reporting …

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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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• Guru: Would You Rather See a Fire Marshal or a Fire Fighter?

  February 28, 2022 Bruce Bading

  While there are similarities between the two, a fire marshal has a preventive role and focus on preventing fire, whereas a fire fighter has a reactive role and focuses on the putting out the smoldering ruins.

  When it comes to your firm’s cybersecurity practices, would you consider yourselves to be proactive or reactive (Fire Marshal or Fire Fighter)? The biggest difference between the two is your level of vulnerability when an attack does happen.

  There are ongoing practices that you can do to reduce your risk. One thing that we recommend is included in every proactive cybersecurity strategy is a …

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• 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 …

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