i-UG i-Power Conference 2026

Following on from his session at the last i-UG conference, "Did a recent unfortunate event at JLR (Jaguar Land/Rover) resonate with anybody?|, at the last i-UG conference, Eddie has been asked back to put some more meat on the bones of the highly effective and largely 'FREE' IBM SafeGuarded copy, Ransomware protection solution from IBM.

Eddie pointed out that this well matured and highly effective IBM offering would have saved JLR many, many millions of pounds and allowed JLR to return to production in a fraction of the time it actually took them?

In this follow-on education session, Eddie Chaffin of ABP will show how ABP Food Group has successfully implemented IBM's SafeGuarded Copy solution, and show you how to go about implementing the sam on your system. You will be able to grab immutable copies of your whole system at scheduled times in the day (Without interrupting production), 'roll back' to any one of these multiple daily points before the Hack or Virus kicked in! It looks like sorcery, but it is REAL.

So successful has the solution been, and so incredible the compression and therefore the space saving been, that ABP now uses the same technology to do scheduled backups, test upgrades within minutes and, if necessary, roll back to the previous image in minutes too. At will, you can run up new partitions and enable testing whilst the production just carries on.  We can even test restore recent hard-copy backups for verification... all without interrupting production.

This is standard IBM software and you can have it too...

Back in April 2021 the Query Supervisor was announced in IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 10. This tool is part of the SQL Query Engine. Maybe you have heard about it and started using it, most likely you only heard about it and never had the time to give a good look. After attending this workshop, that will change as this tool is perfect to detect and handle run-away queries. During this workshop you will learn what this tool can do and how to get started. With the knowledge of this tool under your belt you will get back control and will be able to avoid long running queries jeopardising your LPAR.

Discover a modern, open observability solution for IBM i that combines Prometheus for metrics collection, Manzan for event monitoring, Grafana for visualization and alerting, and Grafana Loki for log aggregation and analysis. This session shows how to gain deeper visibility into system health, performance, messages, and logs through a flexible, scalable platform that integrates IBM i into today’s enterprise monitoring and operations landscape.

Katherina will explain in detail how does MFA on IBM i 7.6 work.  Including all the prerequisites you need to be aware of.

She will guide you step-by-step through the configuration for a normal IBM i use and also how to implement MFA in DST/SST.

Finally, she will discuss what are the options to integrate the function with external software.

In this session we talk about an ongoing Open Source IBM i project to fully automate the creation and renewal of TLS (or SSL) certificates from Let’s Encrypt. At the moment there are a couple things that can only be done manually, but only once.
TLS is important for applications. It encrypts the traffic between the user and the IBM i so that it cannot be read by hackers. Most applications that use web pages need TLS, as modern browsers are insisting on the use of HTTPS which needs TLS certificates. More recently they have blocked the advanced, “I want to ignore the lack of security” too. The lifetime of TLS certificates, for major browsers, are becoming shorter to ensure better security. Currently it is 200 days. This is changing to 100 days on the 15th March 2027 and 47 days on 15th March 2029 by major browsers.
Let's Encrypt use 90 days, changing to 64 days 10 February 2027 and 45 days 16th February 2028. Hence the requirement for automation. In addition Let's Encrypt will allow 45 days from 13 May 2026 for testing purposes.