• IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

  June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would be hard to find a group of enterprise IT shops that are more conservative – meaning averse to risk – than the IBM midrange. Arguably, IBM System z mainframe shops are even more risk averse, but perhaps it is a matter more of scale than degree. In the average IBM i shop, one person – or maybe a handful of people – is keeping risk at bay, while in a mainframe shop there could be dozens or hundreds that are trying to steer the ship without rocking the boat.

  Every now and then, Big Blue publishes an IBM …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 21

  June 3, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  You come to the IBM i PTF Guide to find out what’s new, and I am here to tell you. First of all, there is a new PTF Group for backup and recovery, which is perhaps not very exciting but is nonetheless one of the most critical aspects of the IBM i system. We also find that the HTTP Server in IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3 has security vulnerabilities.

  The relevant PTFs for the Web server fixes are:

  • 3 SI69900 & SI69828
  • 2 SI69901

  For further details check this link.

  Also, there is a new PTF Group …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 20

  May 20, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  It has been a busy week out there in the PTF generation factory at IBM, with a new cume for IBM i 7.2 (following a week after the new cume for IBM i 7.3) as well as a new HIPER Group and a new Web Query Group for all three current releases (that’s IBM i 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3).

  In this week’s issue, there are a few new or updated links in the Guide, as follows:

  • LDAP — IBM Directory Server for IBM i (LDAP)
  • SMTP — Configuring SSL Between IBM i and Remote Mail Router WITHOUT Authentication

  And …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 18

  May 6, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  In this iteration of the IBM i PTF Guide, you will find that there is a new set of PTF patches for the TCP/IP Group for both IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3, and also new HIPER and Security Groups for the big three current release, which are of course IBM i 7.1, IBM i 7.2, and IBM i 7.3. IBM i 7.4 won’t be here until the AS/400’s 31st birthday on June 21.

  Here are the new or updated links in the Guide this week:

  • System IBM i Home Page
  • System IBM i License Topics
  • Open Source Midnight

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 15

  April 15, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  And the PTFs just keep on rolling. . . . This week, there are patches in the HTTP Server Group for IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3. There is also a new Database Group for IBM i 7.2.

  And, as is common with most production operating systems these days, especially those that have a lot of components derived from open source software where things get discovered and patched out in the open where everyone can see and with a rapidity that operating systems of days gone by did not have to deal with, there is a continual stream of …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 9

  March 4, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  This week, the new PTFs coming out of IBM are just for WebSphere Application Server 8.5, and only on IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3. There isn’t much going on otherwise, and this is a blessing, most definitely not a curse.

  I have added a bunch of new links to the spreadsheet that encompasses the IBM i PTF Guide, and these include:

  • IWS/IAS: How To Change the Ports Used by IBM IAS v8.5 and IWS v2.6 Servers
  • WireShark: Instructions for Collecting a Wireshark PC Sniffer Trace
  • AFP: Are AFP Utilities and AFP supported on IBM i 7.3?

  And …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 4

  January 28, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Alright, good people of IBM i Land, here is what is new for the latest edition of the IBM i PTF Guide. There are HIPERs – short for High Impact/Pervasive, meaning you need to pay attention to these – for all three current releases, which means IBM i 7.1 (which is on extended support), IBM i 7.2 (which is still on regular support), and IBM i 7.3 (which is new enough to not care about how old it is yet).

  There are also PTFs for the Backup and Recovery group for IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3 releases. …

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• The IBM i Base Did Indeed Move On Up

  January 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This time last year, in the wake of the 2018 IBM i Marketplace Survey report put together by HelpSystems and based on survey data gathered in the fall of 2017, we said that the IBM i base was ready to move on up to newer iron. And guess what? Based on the results of the survey done in October 2018 and released in the 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey unveiled last week, it looks like a pretty healthy portion of the base did in fact get off older iron and move to shiny new Power9 iron. In some cases …

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• Goosing Big Iron Power Systems With Power9 Migrations

  December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power9-based servers from IBM’s Cognitive Systems division have been rolling out over the course of the past year, and the big iron has been in the field only since the late summer but has perhaps had the largest impact on the revenue and profit stream for the Power Systems line, excepting maybe the installation of the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

  As has been the case since the AS/400 line debuted in 1988 and even with the combination of the System/36 (low-end and midrange) and System/38 …

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• IBM Patches Samba Vulnerabilities In IBM i

  April 16, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue has issued two patches for serious flaws in IBM i’s implementation of Samba, flaws that could result in an attacker launching a denial of service attack or changing user’s passwords. The company patched IBM i 7.2 and 7.3, as support for IBM i 7.1 wanes.

  On April 3, IBM published a security bulletin informing users of the existence of two flaws in IBM i, as well as the existence of two program temporary fixes (PTFs) to patch the problems. Both of the flaws involve Samba, a free and open source implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol to provide interoperability …

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