• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 49

  December 6, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome back to having to worry about security vulnerabilities and PTF patches. This week, there are two security vulnerabilities, a set of patches for IBM i 7.2, and HIPERS for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 – among other things. Let’s do the vulnerabilities to start.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime for IBM i are vulnerable to a remote attacker causing integrity impacts due to the libraries component (CVE-2023-22049), which you can find out more about here. The IBM i PTF Group numbers contain the fix for the vulnerability. Future PTF …

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• Old PHP and Other PASE Apps Break on IBM i 7.5

  November 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Customers running old versions of PHP and other PASE applications like Node.JS may run into compatibility issues when running on IBM i 7.5. The issue is due to an upgrade in OpenSSL support in the latest release of the IBM i operating system, according to Alan Seiden.

  Seiden, the principle of Seiden Group, first sounded the alarm in July about the problems running older, non-RPM versions of PHP and Node.JS on IBM i 7.5, which was upgraded from OpenSSL version 1.0.2 to version 1.1. In October, he recently published a blog post restating the issue.

  “While [the OpenSSL upgrade …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 43

  October 23, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Busy, busy, busy. That is what the good people at IBM Rochester have been in the past week, with a slew of PTFs for the currently supported releases – that is IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.4 that are on standard support and IBM i 7.3 that just went into extended support at the end of September, a trio of security vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack, and two group PTFs for the IBM i 7.2 release that is supposed to be kaput.

  Let’s start with the security vulnerabilities.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is vulnerable to …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 41

  October 9, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Here is something interesting. There is a new cume for IBM i 7.3, just after it goes out of standard support and is now on extended support. For years, we have been after IBM to put a cume out when it stops supporting a release, kind of a summation at end of life. This is the first time Big Blue has managed to do that.

  It is likely a coincidence, but it should have always been policy. It is difficult to round up docs and PTFs for an end of life product two years after the fact. Having a stake …

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• Power10 Upgrade Considerations You Need to be Aware Of

  October 4, 2023 Steve Pitcher

  It has been over a year since Power10 servers have been available from IBM. After many conversations, configurations, proposals, installations, and project debriefs, I wanted to use this article as a point of reflection on some of the nuances around Power10 and the End of Service dates for IBM i 7.3 and Power8 hardware.

  Let’s just jump right into it because we are all busy.

  First: A hardware change is most often used to facilitate the upgrade path to a newer version of the IBM i operating system.

  The Power8 servers top out at supporting IBM i 7.4. They’re …

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• Facing The Challenges Of Upgrading Old Systems With The Cloud

  September 18, 2023 Jason Hardy

  If you are one of the many IBM i shops that has always created its own applications and that has a long history of investing in the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i platforms over the past three and a half decades at reasonably regular intervals to keep the hardware and the systems software current, you have it relatively easy and we definitely want to talk to you about your move to the cloud and how we might help.

  But if you are one of the many OS/400 and IBM i shops that have, for myriad reasons, gotten stuck …

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• Low-End IBM i P05 And P10 Tiers Go Subscription-Only Pricing First

  September 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We were away for our annual summer hiatus relating to the Labor Day holiday in America when Big Blue decided, as we anticipated in mid-August, that it would begin the shift to all-subscription pricing for the IBM i operating system, the integrated Db2 for i relational database, and the related IBM i Licensed Program Products (LPPs) that have been commonly used by Power Systems customers all through the OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i generations.

  Back in February, subscription pricing for the IBM i operating system and its integrated Db2 for i relational database was made available under subscription …

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• Say Sayonara To The IBM i Integrated Server

  August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the neat things about the AS/400 platform and its progeny is that it takes integration seriously, even to the extent of wrapping the OS/400 and IBM i platform around competitive platforms to bring them into the fold. The File Serving I/O Processor (FSIOP), which became the Integrated Netfinity Server, which became the Integrated xSeries Server, which became the IBM i Integrated Server is a good example of this.

  This integrated server approach brought a real, discrete, physical X86 server running Windows Server, OS/2, Novell NetWare, or SCO Unix under the skins of the AS/400 and IBM i Server. …

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• PowerHA Now Replicates To Multiple Targets Sans SAN

  May 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The new release of PowerHA will enable customers to use geographic mirroring to replicate their IBM i data to two or more targets. That one enhancement brings a host of benefits for customers not using SAN-based storage, including new deployment scenarios using on-prem, cloud, and hybrid topologies, as well as lower downtime for hardware upgrades, mirrored Db2 Mirror pairs, and lower RPO for tape backups.

  Prior to PowerHA SystemMirror, most IBM midrange customers who were using high availability (HA) software were using solutions based on logical replication, whereby changes to IBM i data are picked up from the local receiver …

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• IBM Updates Performance Guide For Latest Power10 Iron

  May 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No matter what system you are talking about, no matter what kind of applications you are running, there are always ways to squeeze more performance out of the system. The IBM i platform running atop Power10 and earlier processors is no exception, and to that end, for several years now Big Blue has provided some guidance on pushing performance with each new CPU family and as new features are added to the OS/400 and IBM i software stack.

  The latest such update, according to Steve Will, chief architect of the IBM i platform, has just been published, and you can …

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