Peripheral Support for MSP Customers

For this installment of my Managed Administration Services series, I am going to talk about the peripheral support services our customers have availed themselves from iTech certified administrators. As always, all services are standalone projects as well.

The following is just a handful of the issues that have come up for our partners and been resolved by the teams.

ACS –

Access Client Solutions is a pretty simple concept that has been around a long time. It delivers TCP/IP connectivity between the IBM i and the window based clients that run the PCs users have to perform their jobs. However, like everything else in the Information Technology universe, complexity expands as functionality evolves. So, it used to be a general way to get a 5250 session, maybe some IFS access for share drives, and printer connections…[CONTINUE READING]

IBM i Support Updates

Do you still have an old “System i, “iSeries” or “AS/400” in your shop? Do you know the date it’s going out of support?

January 31st, 2019 you’ll see the POWER5 9405-520 and 9406-520 models go away. That means no more support from IBM. If you have a hardware problem…don’t say we didn’t warn you. For these popular older machines (and there are plenty of them still out there) that means you’ve got 161 days to plan for a hardware refresh to IBM POWER9 servers…[CONTINUE READING]

10 Steps to Prepare for a Security Breach

We have to ask ourselves…what can we do to protect our organizations? In his book “Scouting for Boys” (1908), the founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell said:

“Be Prepared … by having thought out beforehand any accident or situation that might occur, so that you know the right thing to do at the right moment, and are willing to do it.”

It should be our goal to not only prevent security breaches, but to prepare for them, and to manage them to the least possible impact to the organization. It’s critical to be realistic about the environment and to acknowledge that our organizations take risks (to achieve). Security isn’t perfect, but we can all be better and need to take the necessary steps to “Be Prepared.”…[CONTINUE READING]

Featured Blog: 6 Steps to Execute an IBM i Security Project

Many companies want to improve the state of their IBM i security, but they often don’t know where to start. They also might not understand the long-term impact of recommended changes. Having a partner who can help you navigate through your security project can be the difference between success and failure. Let’s take a closer look at six steps to properly execute a security improvement project.

Step #1 – First seek to understand

One of the habits highly successful people practice is to first seek to understand, then seek to be understood; this applies to IT projects too. In order to successfully improve your security, you need to first understand what the state of your current security is… [Continue Reading]

Issues with OpenSSH Algorithms on IBM i OS 6.1, 7.1, and 7.2

If you start to have SSH/SFTP/SCP connections fail with error messages in regards to not matching ciphers, that were working, then stopped working, then this is most likely due to: the partner SSH server or client on the connection is running a very old version of the SSH / OpenSSH code, and you upgraded your OpenSSH on the IBM i (knowingly or unknowingly).

IBM i OS 6.1, 7.1, and 7.2, OpenSSH on these releases was 6.6p1. In OpenSSH 6.7 and subsequent releases, changes were made to the default set of ciphers. The following PTFs, or their supersedes, upgrade OpenSSH on the IBM i from an earlier release to 6.9p1:

• R610 – SI57920
• R710 – SI57762
• R720 – SI57771

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Release levels and PTFs

People are always asking me how often they should be performing PTF maintenance, and when is the right time to upgrade their operating system. I updated this article from last month with the current levels of PTFs. Let’s look at PTFs. First, PTFs are Program Temporary Fixes that are created by IBM to fix a problem that has occurred or to possibly prevent a problem from occurring. In addition, some times PTFs add new functionality, security, or improve performance. Therefore, I am always dumbfounded as to why customers do not perform PTF maintenance on their machine at least quarterly.

If IBM has come out with a fix for your disk drives, why do you want to wait for your disk drive to fail with that problem, only to be told that there is a fix for that problem, and if you had applied the PTF beforehand, you would have averted the problem. Therefore, I think a quarterly PTF maintenance strategy is a smart move. Many of our customers are on our quarterly PTF maintenance program, and that provides them with the peace of mind of knowing their system is up to date on PTFs. Below is a table of the major group PTFs for the last few releases. This is what we are installing for our customers on iTech Solutions Quarterly Maintenance program.

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