IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 50

December 12, 2022

Doug Bidwell

It is another week of interesting security vulnerabilities in the IBM i world, so brace yourself for some research and patching. There are a slew of vulnerabilities that affect the Hardware Management Console for Power Systems, which means any of you IBM i shops that are using relatively large Power machines. There are five new ones, above and beyond the ones we have covered in recent weeks.

First, there is Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in Bind (CVE-2021-25219) affects Power HMC, which you can read about here.

Affected Product(s) Version(s)
HMC V10.1.1010.0 V10.1.1010.0 and later
HMC V9.2.950.0 V9.2.950.0 and later
Product VRMF APAR Remediation/Fix
Power HMC V9.2.950.0 SP3 ppc MB04373 MH01944
Power HMC V9.2.950.0 SP3 x86 MB04372 MH01943
Power HMC V10.1.1020.0 SP1 ppc MB04363 MF70302
Power HMC V10.1.1020.0 SP1 x86 MB04362 MF70301

Second, there is Security Bulletin: Vulnerabilities in Apache HTTP (CVE-2021-33193 and CVE-2021-44224) affects Power HMC, which you can see more about at this link. Same affected versions and APARs to remediate and fix.

Third, there is Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in Apache HTTP (CVE-2020-13950) affects Power HMC, which you can find out more about there. It has the same affected versions and remediations and fixes.

Fourth, there is Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in Kernel (CVE-2021-45485) affects Power HMC, which you can read more about here.

Affected Product(s) Version(s)
HMC V10.1.1010.0 V10.1.1010.0 and later
HMC V9.2.950.0 V9.2.950.0 and later
Product VRMF APAR Remediation/Fix
Power HMC V9.2.950.0 SP3 ppc MB04331 MH01925
Power HMC V9.2.950.0 SP3 x86 MB04330 MH01924
Power HMC V10.1.1020.0 SP1 ppc MB04335 MF69724
Power HMC V10.1.1020.0 SP1 x86 MB04334 MF69722

And finally, number five, there is Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in Kernel (CVE-2022-1012) affects Power HMC, which you can find out more about at this link and which has the same affected versions and fixes.

You should also check out the HMC V10 R2 M1030 Recovery Media – for 7063 Hardware, which you can see more about at this link.

Now, here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

PTF Groups 7.5:

IBM DB2 Mirror for i
IBM MQ for IBM i – v9.2.0/v9.3.0
SAP
QMGTOOLS

PTF Groups 7.4:

MQ for IBM i – v9.0.0/v9.1.0/v9.2.0/v9.3.0
Memo to Users
What’s New!
SAP
QMGTOOLS

PTF Groups 7.3:

MQ for IBM i – v7.1.0/v8.0.0/V9.0.0/V9.1/V9.2
SAP
QMGTOOLS

PTF Groups 7.2:

New (or Updated) links added to the ‘Links’ tab in the guide this week:

New (or Updated) links added to the ‘QMGtools’ tab in the guide this week:

New (or Updated) links added to the ‘ACS_NAV’ tab in the guide this week:

New (or Updated) links added to the ‘Prtr Links’ tab in the guide this week:

Tips/Definitions: How long has it been since you did a SAVE 21?

The Guide at a glance: There are no new defectives this week (12/10/22). Here is the defective PTF rundown, which is the last defective for each release:

Defect Defective APAR Fixing
Date PTF PTF
——– ——– ——- ——-
7.5 11/22/22 SI81328 SE78918 SI81867 (When available)
7.4 12/01/22 MF69086 MA49947 MF70500 (When available)
7.3 12/01/22 MF69085 MA49947 MF70499 (When available)
7.2 12/08/21 SI77634 SE73420 SI78039 (Read the link in the guide!)

Be sure to access the link in the Guide for further details.

Below is the usual archive of the IBM i PTF Guide to help you work through the PTFs in chronological order:

December 10, 2022: Volume 24, Number 51

December 3, 2022: Volume 24, Number 49

November 26, 2022: Volume 24, Number 48

November 19, 2022: Volume 24, Number 47

November 12, 2022: Volume 24, Number 46

November 5, 2022: Volume 24, Number 45

October 29, 2022: Volume 24, Number 44

October 22, 2022: Volume 24, Number 43

October 15, 2022: Volume 24, Number 42

October 8, 2022: Volume 24, Number 41

October 1, 2022: Volume 24, Number 40

September 24, 2022: Volume 24, Number 39

September 17, 2022: Volume 24, Number 38

September 10, 2022: Volume 24, Number 37

September 3, 2022: Volume 24, Number 36

August 27, 2022: Volume 24, Number 35

August 20, 2022: Volume 24, Number 34

August 13, 2022: Volume 24, Number 33

August 6, 2022: Volume 24, Number 32

July 30, 2022: Volume 24, Number 31

July 23, 2022: Volume 24, Number 30

July 16, 2022: Volume 24, Number 29

July 9, 2022: Volume 24, Number 28

June 25, 2022: Volume 24, Number 26

June 18, 2022: Volume 24, Number 25

June 11, 2022: Volume 24, Number 24

June 4, 2022: Volume 24, Number 23

May 28, 2022: Volume 24, Number 22

May 25, 2022: Volume 24, Number 21

May 14, 2022: Volume 24, Number 20

May 7, 2022: Volume 24, Number 19

April 30, 2022: Volume 24, Number 18

April 23, 2022: Volume 24, Number 17

April 16, 2022: Volume 24, Number 16

April 2, 2022: Volume 24, Number 14

March 26, 2022: Volume 24, Number 13

March 19, 2022: Volume 24, Number 12

March 12, 2022: Volume 24, Number 11

March 5, 2022: Volume 24, Number 10

February 26, 2022: Volume 24, Number 9

February 19, 2022: Volume 24, Number 8

February 12, 2022: Volume 24, Number 7

February 5, 2022: Volume 24, Number 6

January 29, 2022: Volume 24, Number 5

January 22, 2022: Volume 24, Number 4

January 15, 2022: Volume 24, Number 3

January 8, 2022: Volume 24, Number 2

January 1, 2022: Volume 24, Number 1

December 6, 2021: Volume 23, Number 48

November 20, 2021: Volume 23, Number 47

November 13, 2021: Volume 23, Number 46

November 6, 2021: Volume 23, Number 45

October 30, 2021: Volume 23, Number 44

October 23, 2021: Volume 23, Number 43

October 16, 2021: Volume 23, Number 42

October 9, 2021: Volume 23, Number 41

October 2, 2021: Volume 23, Number 40

September 25, 2021: Volume 23, Number 39

September 18, 2021: Volume 23, Number 38

September 11, 2021: Volume 23, Number 37

September 4, 2021: Volume 23, Number 36

August 28, 2021: Volume 23, Number 35

August 21, 2021: Volume 23, Number 34

August 14, 2021: Volume 23, Number 33

August 7, 2021: Volume 23, Number 32

July 31, 2021: Volume 23, Number 31

July 24, 2021: Volume 23, Number 30

July 17, 2021: Volume 23, Number 29

July 10, 2021: Volume 23, Number 28

July 3, 2021: Volume 23, Number 27

June 26, 2021: Volume 23, Number 26

June 19, 2021: Volume 23, Number 25

June 12, 2021: Volume 23, Number 24

June 5, 2021: Volume 23, Number 23

June 5, 2021: Volume 23, Number 22

May 22, 2021: Volume 23, Number 21

May 15, 2021: Volume 23, Number 20

May 8, 2021: Volume 23, Number 19

May 1, 2021: Volume 23, Number 18

April 24, 2021: Volume 23, Number 17

April 17, 2021: Volume 23, Number 16

April 10, 2021: Volume 23, Number 15

April 3, 2021: Volume 23, Number 14

March 27, 2021: Volume 23, Number 13

March 20, 2021: Volume 23, Number 12

March 13, 2021: Volume 23, Number 11

March 6, 2021: Volume 23, Number 10

February 27, 2021: Volume 23, Number 9

February 20, 2021: Volume 23, Number 8

February 13, 2021: Volume 23, Number 7

February 6, 2021: Volume 23, Number 6

January 31, 2021: Volume 23, Number 5

January 23, 2021: Volume 23, Number 4

January 16, 2021: Volume 23, Number 3

January 9, 2021: Volume 23, Number 2

January 2, 2021: Volume 23, Number 1

December 26, 2020: Volume 22, Number 52

December 19, 2020: Volume 22, Number 51

December 12, 2020: Volume 22, Number 50

December 5, 2020: Volume 22, Number 49

A Smattering Of Power Systems Announcements

December 12, 2022

Timothy Prickett Morgan

We keep saying that IBM is winding down its announcement stream as 2022 comes to a close, but there is still a trickle of things being announced by Big Blue, both new products and withdrawals, that relate to the Power Systems platform and its adjacent external storage.

First of all, in announcement letter 122-134, IBM is allowing customers – as promised back at the COMMON POWERUp event in October – to run the AIX and Linux operating systems on that special configuration of the Power 1022s machine that has two four-core Power10 dual chip modules (DCMs) in the box instead of a single eight-core Power10 single chip module (SCM).

This machine, which we wrote about here, is interesting in that it allows the resulting entry server to have twice as much I/O for the same amount of compute throughput, which is a clever differentiation that also allows IBM to make the most of all of the Power10 chips and packages coming off the fab lines at foundry partner Samsung. In this case, IBM is allowing for one or two of the Power10 DCMs to be installed, so it can have four or eight cores activated. With the IBM i variant, you have to take a pair of four-core DCMs and you have to activate all eight of the cores. As with the IBM i variant, it is important to remember that this server CPU feature complex does not have an upgrade path. You buy it, that’s it.

In the same announcement, IBM made the Power S1022s with two four-core Power10s eligible for the IBM i Solution Edition, which provides discounts and credits when customers buy selected systems software from Big Blue and application software from third party software vendors. You can see the IBM i Solution Edition bundles at this link. IBM is still showing the Power9 server configurations on its Web site, but there are obviously Power10 setups that can be sold as well, including the Power S1022s.

The AIX and Linux support and the Solution Edition eligibility for this Power S1022s configuration were both available on December 9.

Not that this affects IBM i-only Power Systems shops, because IBM i is not supported on the Power E1050 server, in announcement letter 122-135, Big Blue has reinstated the selling of the feature #EJ10 PCI-Express 3.0 SAS tape/DVD adapter card, which was withdrawn from the catalog on September 13.

In announcement letter 922-139, IBM is also telling the HPC community that it is going to stop selling the Nvidia “Volta” V100 GPU accelerators for the Power AC922 supercomputer node. This stands to reason, since Nvidia launched the V100s in 2018 and the “Ampere” A100s in 2020, and in has just started selling its “Hopper” H100 generation launched earlier this year. IBM has given up on chasing exascale-class supercomputer deals, and this has important implications for the Power Systems line. The first is, IBM has lower revenues than it might otherwise have had over a three year HPC system upgrade cycle that it has participated in for decades. And the second is that the Power Systems line is inherently more profitable, particularly in systems where GPUs represent most of the floating point computation in the system. No one makes money selling large HPC systems to the national HPC labs – they break even at best. So in a funny way, IBM is better off without this business, at least in the short term. In the long term, the many generations of Power-based HPC systems that IBM sold largely to the United States government and to several nations in the European Union helped pay for the research and development for Power processors and memory and I/O systems. Any proper accounting of the true costs and benefits of chasing the HPC business would have to take this into account. The upshot is that IBM is now focusing on developing systems that suit the needs of its AIX, IBM i, and Linux customers, which is a good thing.

In announcement letter 222-360, IBM is updating its Copy Services Manager storage middleware to release 6.3.5. Copy Services Manager is a configuration and monitoring tool that manages the various copy services on IBM’s DS8000 series SANs, its SAN Volume Controller and Spectrum Virtualize storage virtualization platforms, its XIV storage clusters, and its FlashSystem A9000 all-flash arrays. The Copy Services Manager provides a single pane of glass to manage the different but often similar copy services that are native to these platforms and specifically supports Metro Mirror, FlashCopy, and SafeGuarded Copy across these storage platforms in addition to Global Mirror functions on the DS8000 and SVC platforms. Copy Services Manager 6.3.5 will be available on December 16.

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Capture Point Restore: The Perfect Companion For High Availability

December 12, 2022

Ash Giddings

Businesses are constantly challenged by cyberattacks, coupled by their ever-increasing diverse nature. Ransomware and malicious data deletion or corruption can originate from both inside or outside of the business and staying out of the headlines by preventing attacks or at worst limiting the impact is high on the agenda for many.

There’s seemingly never a day goes by without a prominent attack being reported, damaging both the tangible capabilities to conduct business at the time, combined with intangible ongoing damage to business reputation that these destructive incidents invariably bring.

Many businesses have wisely invested in high availability for their IBM i environments, with these solutions such as Maxava HA, normally built on the efficiencies provided by remote journaling. These solutions are, rightly so, the go-to choice when looking to implement an added layer of resilience in an age when both intentional data corruption and inadvertent data loss are on the rise. But is having a high availability solution enough?

A good high availability solution largely goes unnoticed by replicating data from a designated source machine to a chosen target or targets and will include both self-monitoring and self-healing. If corruption occurs on the source or production machine, the high availability solution will, quite rightly, replicate that corruption to the target resulting in corrupt data on multiple servers, making recovery problematic. This is where Maxava Capture Point Restore (CPR) fits in.

Capture Point Restore provides the ability to capture a selection of critical data at designated points or times, and archive it, all transparent to the underlying application and without impacting the users. The capture point can be configured to automatically occur at chosen times – for example every 4 hours – or prior to major events such as an overnight update or invoicing run. The archive can be stored literally anywhere, locally on another IBM i, or even another platform altogether; anywhere where FTP access is capable.

For some businesses storing archives in the cloud may be an attractive option, potentially going some way towards satisfying regulatory compliance. Increasingly popular are backup architectures looking to implement a 3-2-1 rule; that is 3 copies of data to 2 different types of media along with 1 offsite location. Retention rules can be defined making Capture Point Restore a vital cog by storing data sets offsite.

Another use for Capture Point Restore might be Business Intelligence, capturing a subset of data before restoring it to an alternative server for reporting purposes and away from the demands of production workload.

For those running older versions of the operating system, Maxava Capture Point Restore will run on V5R3 and all later versions of the operating system, while both internal and external disk is supported. For some it offers a way of implementing a simple, lightweight form of protection for legacy applications. Both archiving and recovering from previous archives are made simple by way of a graphical user interface.

Maxava Capture Point Restore complements Maxava HA, will work with an alternative HA solution or run totally independently to help provide confidence that business critical data can be recovered should the need arise.

For more information on Maxava Capture Point Restore, the perfect companion for high availability, or for a free trial please visit: https://www.maxava.com/capture-point-restore-ibm-i

Ash Giddings is a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022.

This content is sponsored by Maxava.

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In our SAP on IBM i Webcast “King-Size Data – Deal with it!” on December 1st, 2022, we presented how to cope with large database tables. The presentation included identifying critically large tables, considerations for cleanup and archiving, as well as table partitioning to overcome system limits.

As usual, the recording and slide deck of the webcast have been made available for download at the link http://ibm.biz/RadioSAPIBMi. You can find it there in the folder 2022, subfolder December 2022. If you missed the webcast or want to look at some aspects in more detail, you can look at the provided material and watch the recording at your own speed.

The link is accessible by invitation only. If you are not yet a user of Box, it will be necessary to register (free of charge) at Box with the company e-mail address that will be used for the download. If you have previously downloaded recordings or slide decks of SAP on IBM i webcasts from this link, you should already be authorized to it. If this is the first time you are trying to download material from this link, or if your access was lost for whatever reason, you can request access by sending an e-mail to ibmsapevents@ibm.com and providing your name, company name, country, requested company e-mail address (if different from sender), as well as the requested webcast date and title.