• IBM i Debugger Comes to VS Code

  February 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  At long last, IBM i developers can now debug their code in a development environment other than Rational Developer for IBM i or Merlin. The news came last week, when Liam Allan announced that the ILE debugging feature is now available in Code for IBM i, his third-party, IBM i-centric plug-in for Visual Studio Code.

  “Debugging ILE COBOL and RPGLE inside @code like it’s any other day!” Allan tweeted from his @Notesofbarry Twitter account. “I’m pumped for this release #ibmi.”

  Indeed, this day has been a long time in coming. Allan, who has not been shy about sharing his dislike …

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• 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 2

  January 23, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Two thousand twenty-three is shaping up to be a transition year of sorts in the IBM i community, with midrange Power10 servers hitting the market, IBM i 7.3 (finally) meeting its end, and an economic recession looming. We tapped our network of IBM i prognosticators to help fill in the particulars with part two in this annual series.

  There’s been a security awakening in the IBM i community, and Robin Tatam, director of security technologies with Fortra (formerly HelpSystems), sees that translating into greater security controls as threats to the IBM i proliferate in 2023.

  “The IBM i community is …

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• Multiple Vulnerabilities Pop Up In Navigator For i

  January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Why do we network computers again? Remind me.

  A new security bulletin was released for the Navigator for i system management interface for the IBM i platform on January 18, which rolls up four different vulnerabilities for Navigator for i that leave it open to log file access, to obtaining file attributes, and to SQL Injection attacks due to multiple other vulnerabilities.

  You can read about this security bulletin at this link. The most severe of the issues is the SQL injection attack, which has a CVSS Base score of 6.3 out of 10. According to the bulletin: “IBM …

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• OK, This Really Is The Last Of Power Systems Announcements For 2022

  December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are winding down for 2022, and you are very likely doing the same. There are a few more things we need to go over to close out the year.

  In announcement 122-127, from December 13, IBM has announced that its IBM i subscription offering, which is paired with the subscription-priced Power S1014 that was hinted at during the July announcements and fully fleshed out in September.

  With the changes, IBM is delivering three year and five year terms for initial subscription contracts, complementing the one year and four year contracts that were initially available. These three-year and five-year …

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• Surprise! There’s a Tech Refresh 13 For IBM i 7.3

  December 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, we bet you were not expecting that. Or, based on past history, maybe you were. But when IBM put out the two Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 last Friday on December 2 as planned – that would be TR1 for the latter and TR7 for the former – the company also sneaked out an unofficial TR13 update to IBM i 7.3. With this Tech Refresh, IBM i 7.3 has many of the same updates that came to the two more current releases of IBM i.

  If you look at the IBM i Technology …

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• Finally, IBM i Cloud Dev Instances That Are Powerful And Cheap

  October 24, 2022 Chuck Paolillo

  Back in the old days, when IBM had relatively inexpensive entry AS/400 and iSeries machines and was willing to lease them at special low rates to developers, it was possible for software houses and independent code slingers to get their hands on machinery to create and modify applications. Those days are long gone, and it has been very difficult to replace that cheap and usable functionality in the marketplace.

  With Windows Server and Linux platforms, things are a lot easier because developers can create a variant of their X86 server environment right on their desktops or laptops, and if need …

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• IBM i 7.3 Loses Standard Support On September 30, 2023

  October 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue just got the IBM i 7.5 operating system and system software stack out the door for Power9 and Power10 machines back in May, and from that moment the clock was ticking on regular support for the IBM i release that came out in April 2016 and that represents the second most popular release on primary machines based on data from the most recent IBM i Marketplace Survey.

  Most operating system makers – there are not that many of them left in the datacenter these days – offer standard support for their releases and versions for seven years …

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• What CMOD Functions You Can Access Via New Nav

  September 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM made a lot of news in May with the launch of IBM i 7.5 and Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.3. One of the items that you may have missed in the avalanche of news was the unveiling of a new interface in IBM Navigator for i (a.k.a., New Navigator) that gives access to Content Manager OnDemand for i (CMOD) functionality.

  CMOD, as you probably know, is a licensed application from IBM that has been around for decades, which means there has to be a good number of customers using it for essential business functions. While paper …

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• The Scoop On The Full Subscription Power S1014 With IBM i

  September 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Even before the Power10 entry and midrange servers were announced by Big Blue on July 12, we did a thought experiment at the end of June about a rumored hardware-software-maintenance bundle on the single-socket Power S1014 server aimed at IBM i customers with a single monthly subscription price. And for fun, that thought experiment compared the monthly cost of a high-end iPhone smartphone with cell service and a data plan – somewhere between $75 and $80 – to what we expected such a full subscription-based, on premises Power S1014 would cost. We figured it would be around $50 per IBM …

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• IBM Rejiggers RPM Repos for Open Source Software

  September 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM has made a change to how it distributes open source software for the IBM i platform. Instead of using a single RPM repository to distribute the software for all release of the IBM i operating system, as has been the case for the past five years, IBM is now delivering software through operating system-specific releases. The change was made to address difficulties that have arisen in the use of a single repo for all releases of IBM i, the company says.

  IBM rolled out its new RPM (which stands for Red Hat Package Manager) back in 2018 as a …

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