• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Numbers 51 And 52

  January 6, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  The PTFs keep rolling even through the holidays, so this is our time to get caught up with the last two weeks of patches in 2019 as the new year is beginning.

  In PTF Number 51, we dug a little deeper into the issue we found out about just as The Four Hundred was going on hiatus where LPARs are hanging on machines that have the latest Technology Refreshes applied to IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4 in cases where the Hardware Management Console (HMC) is not managing the partitions.

  The details of the issue with the Technology Refreshes …

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• Cloud Walkers Makes LPARs More Native On IBM i

  December 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a few different technologies that have been grafted onto the OS/400 and IBM i platform from the outside that are just architected differently from and run somewhat counter to the integrated nature of that platform, and all of them are involved, in one way or another, with managing logical partitions on the Power Systems platform and all of them make IBM i shops cranky.

  They are, in no certain order: the PowerVM hypervisor, the Hardware Management Console (HMC), the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), the PowerVC variant of OpenStack that is native to Power Systems, and external disk arrays, …

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• Power S812 Gets Another Reprieve, And Other Power Systems Stuff

  December 2, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For whatever reason, Big Blue did not create a cut-down version of the Power9 entry server aimed at the smallest of the small businesses that run themselves on the IBM i platform. Meaning there was no Power S912 or Power S912 Mini replacement for the Power S812 and its specially priced Power S812 Mini. (The former is based on the Power9 chip, while the latter is based on the older Power8 chip, which has a lot less oomph per core.)

  Back in March, IBM extended the life of the Power S812 and its Mini variant until November 29 of this …

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• IBM i DevOps Gets Simpler On Skytap Cloud

  February 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals who yearn for the administrative simplicity of Amazon Web Services will soon be rewarded when Skytap’s IBM i cloud becomes generally available next quarter. Among the IBM partners Skytap is tapping for the roll-out is Rocket Software, which is integrating the Aldon suite of lifecycle management tools to simplify DevOps in a potentially ground-breaking new way.

  Rocket Software is in the process of certifying its Aldon Lifecyle Manager for IBM i (LMi) software to run on Skytap‘s public cloud offering for IBM i. Late last year, Skytap, which has Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as a major investor …

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• Sundry Power Systems Enhancements Round Out The Year

  October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the fall – autumn if you speak formally as my British friends do – and that means Big Blue has some peripheral announcements to make to finish up the 2018 season.

  In announcement letter 218-346, perhaps the most important development is that the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor has a new update, V3.1, that supports the Power9 processor. We would have thought that this had happened already, way back when the first Power9 iron was announced back in February, but go figure. It may be that this release of PowerVM is the first one that is tuned to …

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• Spring Cleaning In IBM i Land

  May 7, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a busy couple of weeks with IBM winding down a whole bunch of different products related to the IBM i platform. It is a kind of spring cleaning, we suppose. IBM doesn’t usually offer explanations for its decision to discontinue products, so we just have to take them at face value. Sometimes there are upgraded or replacement products, and sometimes it is just the end of the line.

  In announcement letter 918-056, IBM says that it will be withdrawing the 7042-CR9 Hardware Management Console (HMC), and moreover, IBM says that going forward, support for the Model …

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• IBM i Vulns Spotted in Node, BIND and HTTP Server

  September 6, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month moved to patch several critical security vulnerabilities related to the BIND service in IBM i that could allow attackers unauthorized access to IBM i servers running any release of the OS from IBM 6.1 to 7.3. Security glitches were also patched for the IBM i implementation of Node.js, the HTTP Server bundled with IBM i, the hardware management console (HMC), and WebSphere.

  Both ISC BIND vulnerabilities work in a similar way and enabled similar paths into affected systems – namely by allowing an attacker to craft a specially crafted request packet to bypass authentication and therefore gain …

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• IBM Moves HMC Management To Native Power Server, LPARs

  August 14, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Out of band management is not a new thing in the IT sector, and many of the best and most sophisticated pieces of software in the world have a distinct management console of some sort that gathers up the state of a machine or collection of machines and uses it to initially configure those devices and to coerce them to behave themselves despite their nature for electronic mischief.

  The Hardware Management Console, or HMC, has been around for so long in the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i line for so long we can’t remember when people were not …

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