IBM toolbox for Java contains native Java methods for accessing, updating, and interacting with objects and interfaces on IBM i. These key interfaces continue to be updated and improved to ensure that the Java developer has access to the latest IBM i technologies. Some of the enhancements added in this TR include:

• IFS performance improvement when retrieving attributes for directories, files, and symbol links.
• Support for converting varchar to bytes. When using AS400Text.toByte(), the program receives the string without the first two characters because the first two bytes of a varchar are the length of string. The support for varchar in Java toolbox is added.
• IFS User Handle 2 provides single sign-on support to retrieve attributes of IFS files using Kerberos-based authentication.

The open source ecosystem continues to grow, with particular emphasis on the RPM-based set of deliveries. These enhancements include compression tools, command-line utilities, open source databases, and Node.js updates. To get started with RPMs, please visit http://ibm.biz/ibmi-rpms

p7zip

p7zip is a port of the command-line version of 7-Zip to Unix-like POSIX systems. It can work with various file formats including 7-Zip archives (those ending with .7z). For more information, see http://p7zip.sourceforge.net/

zstd

zstd (or Zstandard) is a newer compression library from Facebook. It is designed for real-time activities, so by design it prioritizes speed of compression/decompression operations. For more information, see http://facebook.github.io/zstd

pigz

pigz is a parallelized version of gzip. It can take advantage of multiple CPU cores to speed up compression over standard gzip. For more information, see https://zlib.net/pigz/

Curl with SSH and SFTP support

Curl has been upgraded to 7.70.0 and was also built with the newly released libssh2. This allows it to use ssh:// and sftp:// URLs.

“man page” viewer

The ‘man’ command is now available via delivery of the ‘man-db’ package. This allows you to view reference manuals (often called “man pages”) for many of the packages delivered as RPMs.

autossh

The autossh package provides a tool for keeping SSH tunnels open. For instance, it will automatically restart the tunnel if it crashes. For more information, see https://www.harding.motd.ca/autossh/

tmux

A popular terminal multiplexer, tmux, is now available. It allows you to create multiple SSH terminal sessions that are persistent, meaning you can reconnect and resume work, even if you are disconnected because of a network outage or some other unpredicted event. It also enables multiple windows within your session. For more information, see https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki

Paramiko

The Python Paramiko package is now available in RPM form. Paramiko makes it easy to use SSH, SCP, and SFTP from within Python. It provides a powerful and highly-automatable way use SSH/SFTP as part of business procedures, like pushing or pulling data, running commands, etc. It also provides an easy way to make remote XMLSERVICE calls (especially to IBM i instances in IBM Cloud) using SSH and xmlservice-cli (part of the ‘itoolkit-utils’ package). For more information on Paramiko, see http://paramiko.org/

chsh

The ability to customize which shell is used for SSH sessions has existed for some time via an SQL service. Now, with the chsh RPM package, it’s even easier. For example, just run ‘chsh -s /QOpenSys/pkgs/bin/bash’ to set your default shell to bash.

logrotate

The logrotate tool can be used to automatically rotate, compress, and even remove your log files. This is very useful for log files that may grow very big if left unchecked. The HTTP Server for i supports this out of the box with log cycling, but not all products do this, so having a specialized tool can be useful.

It is very configurable, allowing you to customize the name format of archived logs, how many logs to keep, or whether the archived logs should be compressed. Note that this is not a service that runs continuously. Instead you must run it periodically (or via the job scheduler). It will then analyze all the log files which it is configured to rotate and rotate the files as needed. For more information, see https://linux.die.net/man/8/logrotate

PostgreSQL 12

PostgreSQL describes itself as “a powerful, open source object-relational database system that uses and extends the SQL language combined with many features that safely store and scale the most complicated data workloads.“ PostgreSQL has earned a strong reputation for its proven architecture, reliability, data integrity, robust feature set, extensibility, and the dedication of the open source community behind the software to consistently deliver performant and innovative solutions. For more information, see https://www.postgresql.org/

There are also instructions for installing PostgreSQL on IBM i at https://github.com/IBM/ibmi-oss-examples/blob/master/postgresql/installingpostgresqlonibmi.md

MariaDB

The MariaDB open source relational database is a drop-in replacement for MySQL. It is also one of the most popular open source databases in the world and is the default database for numerous turnkey applications, especially in the PHP ecosystem. For more information, see https://mariadb.org/

GNU Privacy Guard (GPG)

GNU Privacy Guard, also referred to as GnuPG or GPG is an open source implementation of the OpenPGP standard. It uses public key cryptography for signing and encryption. For more information, see https://gnupg.org/

Node.js version 14

The latest release of Node.js that will be on a long-term support (LTS) schedule is available. This release has numerous improvements in performance, security, and diagnostics. For more information on the Node.js release schedule, see https://github.com/nodejs/Release

Ansible is IT automation engine that automates configuration management, application deployment, service orchestration, cloud provisioning, security automation, and so on. The Ansible Content for IBM Power Systems - IBM i provides modules, action plugins, roles and sample playbooks to automate tasks on IBM i, such as command execution, system and application configuration, work management, fix management, application deployment, etc. A new version of Ansible for IBM i collections is available. For detail information, please check https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ansible-support-ibm-i.