• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 1

  January 13, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  We want to remind you once again about the LPARs that 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 are outlined in APAR MA48101, which is essentially a bug report that warns customers of an issue with the software stack and oftentimes gives hints about when and how it will be fixed.

  Here is the issue in a nutshell: IPL-SRCC6003962-WAIT Hang with IBM i 7.3 with …

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• Db2 For IBM i 7.3 Hits A Bad Patch

  December 2, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you know, we are among the people in the IBM i community who are always telling you to keep current on your PTF patches for the best operating system available on Power Systems. (No, we are not talking about AIX or Linux.) But every now and again, as happens with all operating systems, something gets fixed and the fix is worse than the problem it was solving.

  That has apparently happened with the database patches for the Db2 for i relational database management system embedded in the IBM i 7.3 release once the Db2 Group patches from November 13 …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 47

  December 2, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  We hope that everyone in the United States had a Happy Thanksgiving, and we are still “playing ketchup” on the PTF leftovers before that holiday, which gets us into the final stretch of 2019, rolled around. Ketchup is good on turkey, but cranberry sauce is better.

  Just a reminder to everyone: IBM i 7.2 will reach end of support on April 30, 2021. That may seem like a long time from now, but you will be surprised at how fast it comes up. IBM did not say very much in its end of support announcement, which you can see here …

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• Big Power8 Iron Gets A Reprieve, And More Power To You

  October 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The big Power9 iron has been in the field for more than a year now, and IBM had every intention of removing the Power8-based Power E870C and Power E880 E880C from its product catalog by Halloween, and said as much on February 26 this year in an announcement that we covered about a slew of withdrawals for the Power Systems platform.

  In announcement 119-078, dated October 22, IBM has decided to keep the For Sale signs up on the eight-socket Power E870C and 16-socket Power E880C machines for an extra two months, and now you will be able …

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• Digging Into the Latest IBM i TRs

  October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The fall batch of Technology Refreshes (TRs) have been revealed, and as expected, there’s a bit of new functionality available for customers who use IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. In this story, we’ll tackle enhancements in open source, systems management and monitoring, and development, which means we’ll dive deeper into other areas, like database and HA/DR, in a future story.

  Let’s start with the fun stuff: open source. With IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1, IBM has brought support for two prominent open source projects, including ZeroMQ and Redis.

  ZeroMQ is a universal messaging library that allows users to …

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• IBM i 7.3 And 7.4 Get Their Autumn Tech Refreshes

  October 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is hosting its IBM Systems Technical University this week, and used the occasion to quietly launch the Technology Refreshes, or TRs as they are known, for IBM i releases 7.3 and 7.4. If you were running around the Venetian Hotel, you could probably stitch together the extent of the updates to the platform, and to be honest, we are still trying to get all of the details, which were not available as we went to press.

  We will tell you what we know now, and then circle back and drill down into the details as appropriate.

  First of …

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• You’ve Still Got Friends In High Places

  September 23, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past 25 years, and across a total of 78 meetings over that time, the Large User Group, or LUG as it is known, has been helping Big Blue keep the AS/400 and IBM i platform on the right track for the very large enterprises that have the system as their platform for running the mission critical applications that are at the heart of the business. The LUG has put forward thousands of requirements to IBM – both things that the organization wants IBM to do and other things that it wants IBM to stop doing – and …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 25

  June 24, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  First of all, Happy 31st Birthday to the AS/400, which had its anniversary on June 21 when, absolutely not coincidentally, Big Blue shipped the latest and greatest IBM i 7.4 release of its operating system for the Power Systems platform. We have all been eagerly awaiting this new release because of the many new features it has, and we are just beginning to sink our teeth into it.

  For your reference, I upgraded a system running IBM i 7.3 to IBM i 7.4 as soon as the new release was available, and just so you know, all the Java licensed …

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• 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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