by Tom Snyder

Now that you have the newfound capabilities of mapping network drives to and from the IBM i, as mentioned in my previous tips, you may see some new possibilities by providing alternatives to data transfers. But you will also run into some new challenges, such as authorization issues of unsynchronized user IDs and passwords between the Windows world and the IBM i. This TechTip will provide possible implementation methods for both topics with the copy (cp) and move (mv) utilities in the IBM i UNIX environment Qshell.

Do your users have "limited capability," or do you just think they do?

by Carol Woodbury

You don't hear as much about the user profile setting of "limited capabilities" as you used to in the early days of OS/400. In the early releases, configuring users' initial program to launch them directly into the appropriate application as well as setting users' initial menu to *SIGNOFF and their limited capability attribute to *YES was about all an administrator had to do to make sure the data residing on an AS/400 was secure.

Those days are long gone....

There's more to security than just data privacy and confidentiality.

By Carol Woodbury

Recently, I was helping one of our clients compile a list of reasons to present to upper management as to why they needed to implement object-level security. One of the reasons I mentioned was data integrity. As we talked through this point, I realized that, with all of the emphasis on data privacy and confidentiality, the fact that appropriate access control settings can provide data integrity has been forgotten.

Auditing doesn't need to be scary if you have the right tools.

By Carol Woodbury

We seem to be getting a lot of questions about i5/OS auditing functions lately. I'm guessing it's because several laws and regulations either require or strongly suggest that certain activity and file accesses be "logged." Logging in the i5/OS and "i" world is known as "auditing." So I thought I'd answer some of the questions we're receiving.

Give users the authority they need without giving too much.

By John Earl 

I often receive inquiries about controlling powerful users. The question comes in many forms, but it can be paraphrased like this: "I need to keep one user out of file X. Can you show me how? By the way, the user has *ALLOBJ authority, and we can't take that away."

Are IBM profiles making your system vulnerable?

By John Earl

When performing an audit on IBM i, a common concern is identifying and auditing IBM profiles. Depending on your software makeup and configuration, IBM will install no fewer than 20 (and possibly 50 or more) user IDs on your system in support of the operating system and licensed program products (LPPs). From an auditing and compliance perspective, you need to ask yourself some questions:

Several tools available for Windows and Linux desktops allow you to securely delete files containing sensitive information.

By Max Hetrick

In the past, I wrote a tip on how to securely erase an entire hard drive and also mentioned that the best way to dispose of a dead or dying hard drive is to physically destroy it. This method of destroying sensitive information is perfect if you're actually disposing of the hardware, but it doesn't solve the problem of securely destroying information at a file level within a working file system.