IBM has delivered a fix for an issue with the libpq (PostgreSQL) package. The libpq RPM installer script had a subtle issue where the symbolic links did not get created correctly. IBM i users saw warnings like these:
One of the best deals in IBM i services is about to end. Effective January 1, 2025, the “IBM i Service Voucher for Power” program is being withdrawn. The program has long provided Power hardware customers with vouchers for Expert Labs consulting. (Expert Labs was formerly known as Lab Services.)
Many companies are not even aware that they are entitled to vouchers.
Carol Woodbury
I had the privilege of hosting security expert Carol Woodbury as she led a roundtable discussion at this past summer’s OCEAN TechCon. Carol is IBM i Security SME and Senior Advisor with our friends at Kisco Systems.
The Code for i maintainers have updated the Code for i documentation 
with clearer minimum requirements.
Although there are many reasons—including performance—to update to newer PHP releases, the number one reason is to avoid losing security updates.
Each version of PHP (7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, etc.) has three years of support before it is considered end of life. For two years, it gets bug fixes and all security fixes. In the third year, it gets only critical security fixes. After that, nothing!
If you have encrypted your website, API, Telnet server, or other service with TLS (SSL), good for you!
Now, do you know when those certificates will expire? If they expire without renewal, your service could become unavailable without warning.
In the past, to find expiration dates for digital certificates on IBM i, you’d either have to look in the Digital Certificate Manager (DCM), call the Retrieve Certificate Information (QYCURTVCI, QycuRetrieveCertificateInfo) API, or keep extremely good notes!
CERTIFICATE_INFO, an IBM i service recently delivered by IBM, solves all this. This SQL table function, documented here, returns a result table that contains information about server or Certificate Authority (CA) certificates, including their expiration date.
Here’s how to use CERTIFICATE_INFO to find expiring certificates.
As we mentioned in our article on installing ODBC via yum, the latest IBM i open source packages require new repositories.
A notable example is Node.js v20. When we hear users say, “I don’t see Node.js v20 listed in available packages, and yum returns ‘No package nodejs20 available‘,” the reason invariably is that the new repositories, ibmi-base and ibmi-release, have not been installed.
A client asked about a vulnerability found in libwebp, which is used by PHP’s image-handling gd extension.
My first step was to find a reputable source for details. According to this trusted article about the vulnerability, the issue affected only libwebp versions 1.3.1 and earlier. I checked our own system and found we had a patched version from IBM, so we were safe. The client was, too.
Here is the procedure you can use for checking the version of this or any other open source package on IBM i. Read more →
When supporting our Seiden CP+ PHP, we found that documentation for the “classic” ibm_db2 extension for IBM i wasn’t easy to find.
To help ourselves as well as others, we updated the PHP.net manual to describe each ibm_db2.i5_* setting. This blog post links to that manual page and highlights a few of our favorite ibm_db2 settings.
If you are using the Code for i extension and would like to “browse” or view certain source members without the risk of modifying them, use the “Read only” or “Protected” capability.