What's new for IBM Navigator for i

Read about new functions that are now available within the IBM® Navigator for i application in IBM i 7.3.

• Usability and Performance Improvements

  Usability and performance improvements have been made to the IBM Navigator for i application: Quick path

  With new added quick path search field, a feature list will be shown up after input keywords. Then users can click the specific feature to jump into the feature page directly.

• DB2 for i enhancements

  IBM Navigator for i continues to be enhanced for the database user. In IBM i 7.3, DB2 for i is enhanced to allow the database to automatically maintain the history of a table. This temporal table support is reflected in Navigator's database dialogs.

• Authority Collection for a User

  The key reason behind this enhancement is to provide tooling to collect authority information that allows a customer to "lock down" security on their objects. There is often excessive authority today on many customer systems, and many customers are hesitant to change the object level authority in fear of breaking an application. With this enhancement, we provide the support that will allow the customer to trace/collect authority lookups over a period of time, have the system capture the data, and then the customer (or ISV) can analyze the data after it has been captured. This support will allow the customer to better secure their objects with the appropriate level of authority, as they will now have the authority data needed to make the object level authority changes. This support will give the system administrator the infrastructure support needed to make informed decisions related to changing authority.

  To support this new feature, the following areas of the Navigator for i application have been updated for V7R3:

  • New nodes in the console navigation area for starting, ending, displaying, and deleting authority collection for a user.
  • New tasks available for a user within the User list to start, end, display, and delete authority collection.
  • A new Authority Collection tab on the Capabilities page of the User properties panel that shows the current authority collection status for the user.
  • A new table view of the items included in the authority collection. This can be viewed in a web table, or in a new client viewer if IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS) is installed on the PC. The web table will also support Properties and Permissions actions for each object that appears in the list.

  Note: Since the number of items in this list can be quite large (depending on number of objects being searched, and how long the collection is active), it is recommended to use ACS to display the collection list, since this client table view will perform better than the web version.

  By investigating the objects returned by the display authority collection task, the system administrator can discover what object authorities are required versus what the user actually has, so that the authorities can be set to the minimum required authority for the objects.

  Link to more detailed information on Authority Collection in the Security section

• System monitors

  In IBM i 7.3, 12 new metrics for http server are supported. Users can monitor the performance for http server such as requests received rate, http response sent rate and http request process time.

• QoS IPv6 Support

  In IBM i 7.3, IPv6 address is supported fully. User can create policy based on IPv6 address.

• Tape enhancements

  In IBM Navigator for i, the action "Make available" for cartridges is added. The users can select one or more cartridges which is in inserted status to make available.

• NTP enhancements

  NTP is a protocol designed to synchronize the clocks of computers over a network to a common timebase (usually UTC).In order to achieve higher accuracy and reliability of time than IBM i Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) client, IBM i 7.3 can implement Network Time Protocol (NTP) client by porting the NTP version 4 which is a significant revision of the previous NTP standard, and is the current development version.Users can configure NTP server or Client in IBM Navigator for i.

• Performance task enhancements

  Please see the What's new in IBM i 7.3 in the performance topic for detail on the following enhancements:

  - New charting for System Monitor - Visualize Monitor Data will provide a panel with a chart for each metric being monitored with that monitor.

  - Graph History - Visualize Summary and Detail data in the Historical Data collection.

How to see what's new or changed

To help you see where technical changes have been made, this information uses:

• The image to mark where new or changed information begins.
• The image to mark where new or changed information ends.

To find other information about what's new or changed this release, see the Memo to users.