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Welcome Back, iTippers! |
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We are excited to announce
the return of iTips to the VSE community. As most of you are already
aware, iTips is a free service provided by illustro to give you weekly
tips and tricks from the expertise of our staff. Within each newsletter,
you will find the weekly "iTip", with topics spanning many aspects of
our industry.
Please spread the word within your organizations and
invite your coworkers to sign up so they can benefit from this as well!
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Have
You Seen What You've Been Missing? |
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This
Week's iTip! |
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Privilege
classes for VM guests |
If you are running VM with
z/OS, z/VSE, or z/Linux guests, you should review the CP privilege
classes assigned to those guests. Quite probably your guests are allowed
more authority than you need, which can have unfortunate consequences.
Examine the directory entry for each guest, particularly the USER card.
It will look something like:
USER VSEPROD PASSWORD 64M 64M ABCDEFG
This defines userid VSEPROD (with a password of "PASSWORD") to have 64M
of virtual storage, and CP privilege classes A through G. Absent any
class override definitions (more on that in a bit), this means that your
VSE guest can execute any CP command, including those that can alter
real storage or shut down the VM system. Since CP commands can be
executed programatically, this also means that any job that can get into
supervisor state can, for example, forceably log off any other virtual
machine on the same VM image. If your auditors found out, they'd have
kittens.
Far better to limit the scope of what your VSE (or z/OS, or z/Linux)
guest can do by restricting the privilege classes to B, F, and G,
although the required classes may be different in your shop. Class B
allows attach and detach of real devices, such as tape drives. Class F
allows hardware diagnostics, and every user on the system should have
class G, or innocuous "general user" class commands.
If you want to get precise with the privileges that you allow, consider
creating a class override file. This mechanism allows you to define a
new CP privilege class that contains just the commands you specify. The
idea is to take an unused class (IBM only defines commands in classes
A-G) and add commands that your guest needs to that new class, while not
adding any commands that you don't want your guest to have.
For example, if you wanted to allow all class "A" commands except for
SHUTDOWN (brings down the VM system) or FORCE (logs off another user)
then you'd use an override file to create a new class, say "V", that
contains all of the commands currently in class "A" except for SHUTDOWN
and FORCE. Then you'd remove class "A" from the VSEPROD directory entry,
and add class "V".
All of the facilities mentioned in this article are documented in "CP
Planning and Administration" and "CP Command and Utility Reference" for
your release of VM, so go and tighten up your system security.
Do you have something to add to this tip? Add it
to the VSEWiki page! |
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Get Started on
Migrating Your VSE 3.x System
Before It's Too Late
With Help from illustro - the VSE Experts! |
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Time is Ticking. As you
know, IBM
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Call Us or
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learn more
or Call us Toll Free at 866-4-illustro (outside the U.S.
+1.214.800.8900) |
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We
Want to Hear From YOU! |
 Tell
us what you want to know in iTips and give suggestions on topics - send
an email to
itipsfeedback@illustro.com
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