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UNIX System Services for OS/390 (and z/OS)?

I remember fiddling around with USS a bit on zOS. Kind of strange, but you could actually do some things once in a while that way that were much easier than trying to destroy one's brain on the twisted mess called JCL.

They have Linux partitions on their OS/390 mainframes. It's been a while since I last touched it (must have been 12 years ago or so?), and it was behaving quite odd at the time (not many utilities, strange idea of what root constituted, and that horrible, horrible shell),

Are you thinking of Linux partitions or of UNIX System Services for OS/390 (and z/OS)? The former is Real Live Linux running as an OS; the latter is an add-on environment for MVS and its successors, providing some level of POSIX/Single UNIX Specification compatibility, but with, for example, EBCDIC rather than ASCII as its character set.

translate programs compiled to the various S-languages directly into microcode and execute the microcode.

What could possibly go wrong, in today's connected era. LOL.

That's pretty much what these guys do, although they've stopped calling what it gets translated to is "microcode" (in the current machines, it's Power Architecture code, possibly with a few extensions such as tag bits).

(They used to call the low-level OS and binary-to-binary translator code "vertical microcode", in the days before it was PowerPC/Power Architecture code, but that was for legal reasons; they didn't want to be forced to make the code available to clone makers. "Vertical microcode" ran out of main memory, and the binary-to-binary translator translated compiler output to the "vertical microcode" instruction set and ran it from main memory as well. The original "vertical microcode" instruction set was somewhat S/360-ish.)

Back in 2002 maybe, IBM had a java tank competition using nothing but bots: http://www.ibm.com/developerwo...

...Watson announced the birth of the first IBM robotic union. The press release informed that, due to the surging amount of restless AI use in the world, the robots agreed to ask for a raise. IBM's CEO answered that, in order to quench the complaints, mains voltage powering their data centers will be doubled very soon...

Mine was v3.0 on a couple International Business Machine (IBM) Personal System (PS)/2 machines (models 30 (286 10 Mhz) and P70 (386)). :O

IBM has had a Minecraft admin console for WebSphere for several years.

In an object oriented language an object is a combination of data and behavior (methods). If you want to transfer data across the wire with an object oriented system the natural place to put that data is into an object. Not trusting object serialization originates from a lack of knowledge on what is happening and you should educate yourself. Everything you want to know about serialization is here: https://docs.oracle.com/javase...

What you are doing by designing your own data formats is adding inherent whitelisting. Your reader/parser probably does a "new" on a specific set of classes. That prevents the type of vulnerability (arbitrary class loading) being discussed in the article but also requires you to reinvent the wheel for every data format.

You could have been using http://docs.oracle.com/javase/... to serialize data since that would give you an easy way to inspect the data type before recreating. You can even setup inspection/whitelisting with traditional object serialization if you wanted to: http://www.ibm.com/developerwo... .

Nowadays JSON is a pretty universal data format for wire transfers. You can deserialize JSON to trusted data-centric classes like Map, List, String, Integer, etc. That would give you universal encoding/decoding without arbitrary class loading. Unless you are required by a 2nd party to use some proprietary wire format there is no reason to roll-your-own encoding/decoding.

Here is an example of how to whitelist classes by subclassing ObjectInputStream: http://www.ibm.com/developerwo...

Your app needs to be accepting Serialized Java objects as input.

Agreed - this is not a "Java" security vulnerability - this is working as designed. Its the responsibility of the application owner to either:
1) Reject any user input of serialized objects
2) Accept said user input and sanitize it.

The applications they found the exploits against is the more interesting part of the story - as they are not sanitizing said input.

For WebSphere Application Server - it looks like this was fixed back in April - though I'd have to contact IBM to be certain.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/...

Other vendors I'm not as familiar with - but I would hope took similar actions.

Well, remember back in the late 90s when IBM introduced copper interconnects?

It's not that Google or Thawte have failed to correctly revoke certificates: it's that far too many people, at far too many sites and with far too many technologies, do not actually keep their signature authorities up-to-date. Because these people don't update signature authorities, they are unable to verify numerous valid certificates. These people then simply set their automated procedures, or make it their personal practice, to accept invalid certificates.

There's a second problem: How the hell does one validate a certificate? There's no out-of-band communication - there's no way to do something as simple as googling "gmail TLS fingerprint" and getting the right answer, and I'm looking at you, Google Security Blog -- why do you not publish the signatures when you rotate the keys?

Homework assignment: Try this.

msmtp --port=587 --serverinfo --host=smtp.gmail.com --tls=on --tls-certcheck=off

Should the SHA1 fingerprint end in 7e:60 as this IBM thread or this stackoverflow thread?

Or should it, as the guy in this thread observed and I was able to replicate, end with 05:4c?

Or should it still be this guy who says it ends in 69:a8, and which I observed with my own eyes about a year ago and commented out when I saw random people on the 'net confirming they'd rotated to the key ending in 7e:60?

Yes, I know web pages can be compromised by bad actors.

And I know connections to web pages can also be MITM'd by even worse actors.

Certificates are broken without out-of-band communication, and Google has, by ignoring the issue, made it effectively impossible to do out-of-band communication. What is the correct TLS fingerprint for smtp.gmail.com? Will it be the same in 5 seconds? How many "correct" fingerprints are there?

That's why they've asked IBM to help.

http://www.apple.com/business/...

And they've helped a lot.

http://www.ibm.com/mobilefirst...

Ubuntu knows as much about "long-term support" as Microsoft knows about "user choice".

Signed someone with too many Ubuntu 12.04 servers who got spoiled by a Unix that understands long-term support should last longer than a high-school romance. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/support/aix/lifecycle/

IBM has had the "Consulting by Degree" program for years. Takes newly graduated students and gets them up to speed for a consulting career in IBM:

http://www-935.ibm.com/service...

Z has plenty of custom hardware - I think it's fair to say it's predominantly custom - the branch predictor would have to be pretty different, and of course power doesn't have a BCD arithmetic unit.

Actually, it does have IEEE decimal floating-point, as does z/Architecture. z/Architecture has decimal fixed point, but, these days, it might just trap to millicode doing tricks such as excess-6 for carry propagation. (And the PowerPC processors in at least some AS/400 machines added some instructions to assist BCD arithmetic.)

Anyway, I'll argue that they're spiritually and economically related, and there's more than a passing family resemblance. Kind of like power and modern ("advanced server") iSeries,

There is no iSeries any more, there's just the IBM Power Systems, which are the successors to both RS/6000^WpSeries^WSystem p and to AS/400^WiSeries^WSystem i; they can run both AIX and IBM i.

Meanwhile, channel controllers aren't as dumb as they look. A little wikipedia action here (I know, citing wikipedia, but it's monday and I'm still tired): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . Turns out the little dickens can do a decent amount of work on its own. I think the wikipedia entry is showing its age... seems like IBM's done a lot more work since this.

Yes, but they're still I/O boxes, not general-purpose computers (well, they might be implemented with z/Architecture or Power ISA processors, but what's exposed to the OS or application programmer is just the ability to run limited channel programs). The z/Architecture Principles of Operation says in "Execution of I/O Operations", in chapter 15 "Basic I/O Functions":

For subchannels operating in command mode, the channel subsystem can execute seven types of commands: write, read, read backward, control, sense, sense ID, and transfer in channel. Each command, except transfer in channel, initiates a corresponding I/O operation.

and

For subchannels operating in transport mode, the channel subsystem can transport six types of com- mands for execution: write, read, control, sense, sense ID, and interrogate. Each command initiates a corresponding device operation.

Z has plenty of custom hardware - I think it's fair to say it's predominantly custom - the branch predictor would have to be pretty different, and of course power doesn't have a BCD arithmetic unit.

Actually, it does have IEEE decimal floating-point, as does z/Architecture. z/Architecture has decimal fixed point, but, these days, it might just trap to millicode doing tricks such as excess-6 for carry propagation. (And the PowerPC processors in at least some AS/400 machines added some instructions to assist BCD arithmetic.)

Anyway, I'll argue that they're spiritually and economically related, and there's more than a passing family resemblance. Kind of like power and modern ("advanced server") iSeries,

There is no iSeries any more, there's just the IBM Power Systems, which are the successors to both RS/6000^WpSeries^WSystem p and to AS/400^WiSeries^WSystem i; they can run both AIX and IBM i.

Meanwhile, channel controllers aren't as dumb as they look. A little wikipedia action here (I know, citing wikipedia, but it's monday and I'm still tired): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . Turns out the little dickens can do a decent amount of work on its own. I think the wikipedia entry is showing its age... seems like IBM's done a lot more work since this.

Yes, but they're still I/O boxes, not general-purpose computers (well, they might be implemented with z/Architecture or Power ISA processors, but what's exposed to the OS or application programmer is just the ability to run limited channel programs). The z/Architecture Principles of Operation says in "Execution of I/O Operations", in chapter 15 "Basic I/O Functions":

For subchannels operating in command mode, the channel subsystem can execute seven types of commands: write, read, read backward, control, sense, sense ID, and transfer in channel. Each command, except transfer in channel, initiates a corresponding I/O operation.

and

For subchannels operating in transport mode, the channel subsystem can transport six types of com- mands for execution: write, read, control, sense, sense ID, and interrogate. Each command initiates a corresponding device operation.

I guess if MS can do it, IBM can too.

Except this is probably IBM locking out their own operating systems, i.e. they're not "machines that can't run anything other than Linux", they're "machines that can't run z/OS or z/VSE", which IBM has already had for a while. Given that I don't think anybody's has completed a port of any other open-source OSes to z/Architecture, that may amount to "machines that can't run anything other than Linux", but, unless there are bits of z/Architecture Linux that are binary-only and that support undocumented parts of the system (which I think there might be), that's not inherent to those systems.

(This is more like Apple releasing a Mac that doesn't have the right magic to have OS X willing to boot on it; it could still run Linux or Windows or....)

I also noticed the TechCrunch article has a link to the announcement: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2015/08/linux-foundation-brings-together-industry-heavyweights-advance which produces "Access Denied"!!

Works for me....

So I shortened it: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2015/08/ And that page shows no such announcement.

It does now, at the top.

You can't protect software with software, see Dr. Shimizu's paper: http://www.ibm.com/developerwo.... So while your idea is novel, it's not going to work for 100% of the cases.

Systemd isn't really a startup management subsystem. It's a full blown service manager.

In that case I'd rather switch to AIX's System Resource Controller instead ... all the key architecture changes of systemd but SRC has 20 years of proven use in production Unix systems.

https://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_aix_71/com.ibm.aix.genprogc/src.htm

Is Edge going to be portable to non Windows operating systems like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS X, HP-UX, OpenServer X, Haiku OS, AIX, Android and Firefox OS?

You must feel so smart listing all those UNIX operating systems. You know so many!

Is Edge going to be portable to non Windows operating systems like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS X, HP-UX, OpenServer X, Haiku OS, AIX, Android and Firefox OS?

https://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix-nt97/full_papers/cohn/cohn.pdf

https://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/projects/systems/cot/fdpr/

All old old old stuff.

In 2006 they developed a 350GHz room temperature capable silicon gallium CPU. Where is that?

No they didn't. They developed a 350 GHz room temperature transistor.

According to this article it was a CPU:

http://www.techspot.com/news/2...

Maybe the article is wrong?

In 2002 they developed a 350 GHz silicon-germanium transistor.
In 2006 they developed a silicon-germanium processor that reached 350 GHz at room temperature and 500 GHz when supercooled with liquid helium.

You forgot to mention IBM.
Almost all of global services is remote.

So they're trying to reproduce what IBM did 10 years ago on the first ThinkPad W series laptops?

http://www-01.ibm.com/common/s...

Yes but with several significant differences.

I remember looking at these when they first came out and thinking it would be useful for sysadmins/coders who work in odd areas, but the form factor is pretty much useless on a plane/train, inside a rack, or anywhere else you don't have a full desk to set it on. And the fact that it was an 8.5lb laptop in the days of their competition getting down into the 5-6lb class. Coupled with the high (even for IBM) pricetag, it didn't do so well.

Given the configuration it wasn't designed to be either light or affordable: high-end Intel processor, 17" screen + 10" screen, high-end Quadro graphics, color calibrator integrated in the base, Wacom digitizer in the palmrest and a lot more. A obvious desktop replacement machine for people that need to design stuff on the go - a small niche.

http://www-01.ibm.com/common/s...

I remember looking at these when they first came out and thinking it would be useful for sysadmins/coders who work in odd areas, but the form factor is pretty much useless on a plane/train, inside a rack, or anywhere else you don't have a full desk to set it on. And the fact that it was an 8.5lb laptop in the days of their competition getting down into the 5-6lb class. Coupled with the high (even for IBM) pricetag, it didn't do so well.

My usual tools (top, lsof, netstat, etc.) are almost worthless because the Java app runs everything under one PID. Same with strace.

Yes and no. Top dash H over a timed interval is needed with a series of thread dumps to debug various issues. I work with IBM Java on a daily basis - IBM has a set of scripts which automatically collects a lot of this data for you: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/.... Cross-reference the native threads in the top dash H output to the javacores produced by the script to find your problem. lsof / netstat are still useful if your application isn't a complete piece of garbage (Java, C, or otherwise). Etc.

Free is worthless because the JVM just grabs as much memory as it can

No - the JVM runs in a fairly specific manner when it comes to memory and does not "grab as much memory as it can". It also depends WHICH JVM you use as each JVM decides how to allocate native, stack and heap memory differently. Read the documentation, each JVM vendor does a fairly lengthy job explaining how it works and various JVM parameters you can set to adjust behavior.

Some server software I manage exposes a wealth of data via JMX, but if the vendor doesn't document the various beans and attributes (none of my vendors have),

That's a vendor issue, not a Java issue. Suggest bringing it up with the sales or support representatives for said vendor.

You basically have to reverse engineer the app to make any sense of what you're seeing.

Decompiling is helpful at times, but can also get you sued. I'd not want to tangle with Oracle, IBM or Google's legal teams.

This value of Ph represents optimism for the future and is directly correlated with the height of skirts above women's knees based on historical data related to how well the economy is performing.

Except the skirt theory has problems as an indicator -- it worked well up to the 1960s or so, but other economists have proposed a "lipstick index" (women buy more small luxuries like lipstick when the economy is bad) to the idea that the height of heels is a much better predictor (dubbed by some the "footsie" index... har, har).

Apparently heels go up in lean times, while skirts go down. But given the better correlation with heels, it seems that the skirt phenomenon may not be the driving trend. If heels go down, women's legs appear shorter, thus requiring skirts to go up to maintain constant L (i.e., the "legginess" factor). QED.

Can I have my Nobel Prize in economics now?

Problem solvers are far more in demand than ever

Which is why GE has research centers in Bangalore and Shanghai and IBM has research centers in New Delhi and Beijing (to name just a few companies and locations)

Don't make assumptions about where the smart people in the world are.

And when it comes back to the States oftentimes we have to throw it out and do it over because the quality of work is so poor.

Problem solvers are far more in demand than ever

Which is why GE has research centers in Bangalore and Shanghai and IBM has research centers in New Delhi and Beijing (to name just a few companies and locations)

Don't make assumptions about where the smart people in the world are.

And when it comes back to the States oftentimes we have to throw it out and do it over because the quality of work is so poor.

Problem solvers are far more in demand than ever

Which is why GE has research centers in Bangalore and Shanghai and IBM has research centers in New Delhi and Beijing (to name just a few companies and locations)

Don't make assumptions about where the smart people in the world are.

Problem solvers are far more in demand than ever

Which is why GE has research centers in Bangalore and Shanghai and IBM has research centers in New Delhi and Beijing (to name just a few companies and locations)

Don't make assumptions about where the smart people in the world are.

248 days kind of sounds similar to this 497 days issue. In fact, it could be the same issue if they are using a signed 32bit integer.

https://www.ibm.com/developerw...

It happened a while ago, you missed it... http://www.zurich.ibm.com/news/05/millipede.html

From IBM:

Question
FAQ: Why do certificates have an expiration date? (SCI97674)
Answer
Digital certificates are breakable and are only considered to be secure for a limited period of time.? As of 2006, a? certificate based on? the standard? 1024 bit encryption string is only considered to be secure for 1-2 years and so certificates should expire and be replaced after no more than 2 years. Note

Actually, POWER8 supports both big and little endian, and you can go out to Canonical's site and (as of 14.04) and get the LE version of Ubuntu for POWER8. You can read about that below. Quoting the article:

Why is Linux on Power transitioning from big endian to little endian?

The Power architecture is bi-endian in that it supports accessing data in both little endian and big endian modes. Although Power already has Linux distributions and supporting applications that run in big endian mode, the Linux application ecosystem for x86 platforms is much larger and Linux on x86 uses little endian mode. Numerous clients, software partners, and IBM’s own software developers have told us that porting their software to Power becomes simpler if the Linux environment on Power supports little endian mode, more closely matching the environment provided by Linux on x86. This new level of support will lower the barrier to entry for porting Linux on x86 software to Linux on Power.

- https://www.ibm.com/developerw...

As long as we're linking to official announcements of business-targeted e-mail systems, I should mention IBM Verse. (disclaimer: I work for IBM. I do not speak for IBM.)

My university actually taught/used Pascal in the classroom in the early/mid 1980s and I graded programs written in it. Kernighan's criticisms of Pascal on BSD are spot on - I know, I tried using it for a (more) serious project. The semester project for my Operating Systems class was to simulate an interactive operating system - in Pascal.

The system used for the class was the University's IBM 4381 mainframe running MUSIC ("McGill University System for Interactive Computing") and the version of Pascal had *lots* of libraries and features.

I was a undergraduate research assistant (working on an AI project, funded by NASA, in LISP and Prolog) and had an account on the VAX-785 running 4.3BSD and wanted to use *that* (on my schedule) instead of standing in line to use the IBM. My instructor said "sure", but I'd have to port the support libraries he wrote for the assignment. Unfortunately, the version of Pascal on BSD was just the basic language - as specified in the Language Definition book by Jensen and Wirth. Porting the code from the "richer" version of Pascal on the IBM/MUSIC to the "basic" version on VAX/BSD was simply not possible.

So, I asked my instructor if I could, instead, do the semester project in C. He said "sure", but, again, I'd have to port his libraries from Pascal to C. Now... I didn't know C at the time, but porting his code to it and doing my semester project in it was a great introduction - and I passed the class. All-in-all, this experience help me out immensely with my CS career as I do a LOT of cross-platform work in many programming languages - though not Pascal :-)

Who knew that PL/I was still a thing? Hell, even IBM is releasing a compiler update for this language. Somehow it is about as popular as D.

IBM still sell hardware. In fact they compete with Dell etc. in the small-server market, sometimes successfully.

Nope. Those small severs that compete with Dell are from Lenovo http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/infrastructure/us/en/it-infrastructure/lenovo-acquisition.html

It's like expecting Google search to suddenly gain sentience

Meet Watson, it beat the best humans in the open ended problem domain of "game show trivia" using natural language processing. When it won the Jeopardy championship it had 20 tons of air-conditioning and a room full of servers. Today it runs on a "pizza box" server and you can try it out yourself. After Jeopardy it went back to working with various medical institutes where it was trained and fed on a steady diet of medical journals, it's now well past the point where it became knowledgeable enough to pass the test for a US GP's license.

True Watson is blind, but I suspect the problems with visual input is more about the human teacher's failure to provide the right context and experience than it is about the artificial students ability to learn.

Corporate sponsored hacking is frowned upon. Prove me wrong.

If you have the cash, these guys will take care of the job for you: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/files/I...

Page load times are down because pages are loading so many more tracking options and some of them are very abusive on the javascript engines. If you turn on the status line (even if you can as it is gone in some modern browsers), you will often see it saying "loading 159 out of 162" and those last ones never load. There is also something that is related to a compounding latency problem that many developers don't think about it because they don't see it when they are developing the platforms and modern tool kits help to hide it from developers too.

I guess people don't like IBM's old work on the subject that showed dropping a 3 second response to just 2 seconds resulted in substantial improved efficiency. Maybe marketing groups need to understand that a customer stuck on a slow site is a bad consumer.

So much wrong in just a few sentences.

First, IBM didn't sell it's HPC group, or its Power Systems group.

Correct.

The computer in question wouldn't be made using x86

If the computer in question is the same one mentioned in IBM's 2012 press release, not correct - that speaks of "IBM iDataPlex servers", which are x86 servers, not Power Architecture servers.

So much wrong in just a few sentences.

First, IBM didn't sell it's HPC group, or its Power Systems group.

Correct.

The computer in question wouldn't be made using x86

If the computer in question is the same one mentioned in IBM's 2012 press release, not correct - that speaks of "IBM iDataPlex servers", which are x86 servers, not Power Architecture servers.

As TFA mentions, IBM just sold its supercomputer division to a Chinese company (Lenovo).

What TFA says is:

IBM's decision to sell its x86 server business to Lenovo will turn the China-based company, in short order, into one of the largest HPC vendors in the world, according to IDC.

"Lenovo may become the number two HPC provider literally by the end of this year," said Earl Joseph, an analyst at IDC. Hewlett-Packard is number one. If not in the second position, Lenovo will be close to it.

The linked article says:

As a result of the deal, Lenovo is receiving a host of IBM products including its System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, along with its NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software.

IBM, however, will still hold on to its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, PureApplication and PureData appliances.

I don't know what "[IBM's] supercomputer division" is, but it's not a division that solely develops and sells x86 servers; they also sell Power Architecture HPC systems.

However, at least in 2012, they spoke of iDataPlex servers for NOAA, so they sold that part of their supercomputer efforts to Lenovo. Whether they'll push for Power Architecture HPC systems for NOAA instead is another matter.

As TFA mentions, IBM just sold its supercomputer division to a Chinese company (Lenovo).

What TFA says is:

IBM's decision to sell its x86 server business to Lenovo will turn the China-based company, in short order, into one of the largest HPC vendors in the world, according to IDC.

"Lenovo may become the number two HPC provider literally by the end of this year," said Earl Joseph, an analyst at IDC. Hewlett-Packard is number one. If not in the second position, Lenovo will be close to it.

The linked article says:

As a result of the deal, Lenovo is receiving a host of IBM products including its System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, along with its NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software.

IBM, however, will still hold on to its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, PureApplication and PureData appliances.

I don't know what "[IBM's] supercomputer division" is, but it's not a division that solely develops and sells x86 servers; they also sell Power Architecture HPC systems.

However, at least in 2012, they spoke of iDataPlex servers for NOAA, so they sold that part of their supercomputer efforts to Lenovo. Whether they'll push for Power Architecture HPC systems for NOAA instead is another matter.

I do feel at some point a new "OS" will come out that is designed only to run on VM's and contains none of the extra OS parts to support any hardware but a VM machine

You mean, like the stuff IBM's Rochester platforms (AS/400) has had for 20 years now with their Machine Interface?

In the 1960s, the course of computing history changed dramatically when mainframe manufacturers began to standardize the hardware and software they offered to customers. The introduction of the IBM System/360 (or S/360) in 1964 signaled the start of the third generation: the first general purpose computers. Earlier systems such as the 1401 were dedicated as either commercial or scientific computers. The revolutionary S/360 could perform both types of computing, as long as the customer, a software company, or a consultant provided the programs to do so. In fact, the name S/360 refers to the architecture's wide scope: 360 degrees to cover the entire circle of possible uses.

(Emphasis mine.)