Hi all, I've posted on the list before on this subject with the question if anybody ever had tried setting adminonclientport to no and how that would work with both server to server communications, command routing and virtual volumes as well as eg. webclient logins.
Since nobody answered I've setup a small test-environment on my test server consisting of 4 servers all with a dsmserv.opt like this: COMMmethod TCPIP TCPPort 1500 TCPADMINPort 1540 adminonclientport no EXPInterval 0 VOLUMEHISTORY /tsm/etc/bucket/volhist.bck DEVCONFIG /tsm/etc/bucket/devconf.bck EVENTSERVer YES SELFTUNEBUF YES QUERYAUTH SYSTEM Of course each has its own TCPPORT and TCPANDMINPORT. I defined each server on the other servers using the tcpadminport, as per the manual. After that I was able to route commands from bucket to all other servers in the 'enterprise configuration', so far so good. Now I defined a server2server devclass and did a database backup to that devclass, this also worked as expected, meaning it is possible for servers to communicate fully using only the TCPADMINPORT. Of course I was also worried that webclient logins (of the new dsmj gui logins) would not work, since these require an admin login. Fortunately, this also still works. Therefore I can only conclude that It is perfectly safe for us to set adminonclientport no and a separate tcpadminport. This way we can actually shield our admin interface from foes on the internet (or customers that do not have admin rights) while still allowing our clients to connect from anywhere. Of course, setting QUERYAUTH to anything other than NONE also helps against users/customers querying the server.... I guess this was once a request from me to IBM, so thanks to IBM for implementing this! -- Met vriendelijke groeten, Remco Post SARA - Reken- en Netwerkdiensten http://www.sara.nl High Performance Computing Tel. +31 20 592 3000 Fax. +31 20 668 3167 PGP Key fingerprint: 6367 DFE9 5CBC 0737 7D16 B3F6 048A 02BF DC93 94EC "I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course - the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end." -- Douglas Adams