• Locking Down Exit Point And IFS Vulnerabilities On IBM i

  March 24, 2021 Pauline Brazil Ayala

  It’s true that the IBM i server is among the most securable servers on the planet. But all too often, customers do not take the time to secure their environments properly. This is particularly true for two of the most oft-neglected components of the IBM i environment: exit points and the IFS.

  IBM introduced exit points with the launch of OS/400 V3R1 way back in 1994. We remember that version well here at Trinity Guard, because soon after that, we developed the industry’s first exit point monitoring software for the AS/400 at PentaSafe, the spiritual predecessor of our company. …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 1

  January 11, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  This is the first IBM i PTF Guide of 2021, so we wish everyone a Happy New Year and we are declaring here and now that 2021 will be a better year than 2020, and as it is written, so let it be done.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • TCP/IP

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • TCP/IP

  PTF Groups 7.2:

  • TCP/IP

  PTF Groups 7.1:

  • Nothing, as is usually the case unless something really funky is going on. And considering that Big Blue is now supporting IBM i 7.1 on logical partitions on Power9

  …

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• How The Latest TRs Bolster The Core IBM i OS

  October 7, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Yesterday was Technology Refresh (TR) day for IBM and its IBM i operating system, and Big Blue didn’t disappoint. The company unveiled new releases of IBM i 7.4 and 7.3 that bring a slew of new capabilities to the core operating system as well as surrounding offerings like Db2 Mirror, ACS, and RDi. In this article, we’ll look at enhancements to the core OS and related key features.

  During a COMMON webcast Tuesday, IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will touched broadly on a number of enhancements that soon will be available in the TRs. Most of the new capabilities will …

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• MAGiC to Host In-Person User Conference

  September 28, 2020 Alex Woodie

  If you are itching to get out of the house and complete some in-person IBM i education, then the upcoming MAGiC Conference might be for you. In early November, the group is planning to host a small get-together of no more than 40 socially distanced attendees in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

  The Annual MAGiC Conference, slated for November 9-11 at the Hilton Virginia Beach Oceanfront hotel, will be the first in-person IBM i conference since COVID-19 shelved the usual midrange happenings, says Laura Hamway, the leader of the Mid-Atlantic Group of IBM i Collaborators, also known as MAGiC.

  That’s a …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 26

  July 6, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Well, we made it through half of 2020, and that is something of a miracle. Let’s hope the second half is not so dramatic. The odds are not favoring that at the moment, but hope springs eternal and that is how we have made it through the past 15,000 years of pre-history to today, if you think about it. It’s helpful to take the long view at critical times.

  As far as PTFs go, there is a new HIPER for the Virtual I/O Server, or VIOS, which we know all you IBM i shops love. The HIPER is IJ25390, and …

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• Security Gaining Attention On IBM i, But More Progress Needed

  June 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  First, the good news: IBM i shops are paying more attention to security and are making it a priority, according to the 2020 State of IBM i Security Study. But that isn’t necessarily translating into better security, as too much data remains vulnerable, the new report concludes.

  “A deeper understanding of the risks and the security controls built into the OS is currently driving a wave of interest in prioritizing cybersecurity issues on IBM i,” Robin Tatum, director of security technologies at HelpSystems, wrote in the 2020 State of IBM i Security Study, now in its 17th …

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• Guru: Use The Administration Runtime Expert To Validate Your System Configuration

  June 22, 2020 Dawn May

  Using the Administration Runtime Expert (ARE) to validate system configuration settings is an easy way to confirm configuration values are set the way you want them to be. You can use ARE to ensure these system configuration settings are consistent across multiple IBM i partitions or to verify settings have not changed on an individual partition. In this second in a series of articles on ARE, we’ll walk through the steps to set up a basic template to validate system configuration settings.

  The first step is to identify what system configuration attributes you want to make sure are consistent or …

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• Why You Need To Implement Exit Point Security – Now

  June 15, 2020 Rich Loeber

  As everyone knows, the only truly secure computer is one that is not networked to any other system or any client, and that has no users doing anything at all on the system. And if you really want to be honest about it, you should probably turn its power off. Then, it would be perfectly secure – and perfectly useless as well.

  To make any system useful, it has to be opened up so it can be reached by the world, and it may be hard to remember this now, three decades after the client/server and Internet revolutions, but there …

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• Guru: Introduction to the Administration Runtime Expert

  June 1, 2020 Dawn May

  Business-critical applications must be up and running reliably without failure. When something unexpected occurs, you must identify the cause and correct it quickly. Whether you’re a developer launching a new application, enhancing an existing application, or maintaining a legacy application, or an administrator managing the infrastructure, we all want to find ways to make our jobs easier, and unexpected surprises are not fun. I expect the relentless push to do more with less is only going to intensify while the tolerance for failure keeps dropping. Yet identifying points of failure can be tricky as complexities scale.

  IBM i offers a …

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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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