> On Dec 14, 2016, at 1:13 PM, Elardus Engelbrecht > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Warning! Edward and I am now hijacking this thread to discuss something very > odd/fishy... ;-D > > :-D *-D ;-D > > Edward Gould wrote: > >> Thirty + years ago (pre-RACF) we put update password on the mastercats. >> Worked like a charm for us. > > Passwords? Hmmm, my very first boss (now dead) used that, but they were then > already starting to expand usage of RACF and getting rid of passwords. Then I > become later storage admin and soon found out I really need RACF to protect > my catalogs, datasets as well my SMS + HSM then. And dropping passwords at > all of course. > > > Ok, Edward, first thing first! Thanks for your kind notes. I humbly > appreciate it., > > Please educate me about those passwords and management of that. How did you > managed it? What if the password holder is ill or dead of fired, what then? > What happens if that dataset 'password' is deleted? Were the contents > readable or was that content scrambled? I never could figured that out…
At the time we were a medium to large DC in Chicago. If memory serves me 8 sysprog types having said that we also had very low turnover (1 or 2 in the 10 years I was there). One of my varied duties was creating TSO id’s . None (maybe 2 others) of the others (except the senior guy) had the password. We kept the password within the 2-3 sysprogs so if one wasn’t available it was a phone call (They had to open it up to another sysprog as I liked to take vacations off the grid). Coming from MVT (where there was *NO* security) one of my duties was to keep the master cat clean. RACF was still in its infancy and I think ACF2 just came out (fuzzy on that part). We needed the ability to swap mastercats in a few minutes because the drives we had were (I think) STC washing machines and they tended to break at the worst possible time. So we created a backup mastercat and that is why we didn’t want anything in there other than mandatory system (and alias’s) datasets. Ed > > Oh, last question please, if you don't mind, were passwords used when mcat > was opened first during IPL? > > Now, I am still astonished that provisions for passwords are still there in > ISPF panels! Beside backward compatibility reasons, why are passwords still > supported in utilities and ISPF, even now at year 2016 and z/OS v2.1 + v2.2? > > Groete / Greetings > Elardus Engelbrecht > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
