Re: 400 report to PC file & report security

Thanks to lots of people - Al Alex Bill Dan Eric Frank Jim Mark Martin Neil 
for lots of helpful tips on this & other topics that I will be pursuing in 
the days ahead.

Thanks especially for the spread sheet tip to define 400 dates properly to 
avoid
MM
divided by DD
divided by YY

> As it has been explained to me before on this list, a spool file 
>  does not exist in a physical file.  There is not place you can 
>  locate it in DASD (realistically we know that it must exist on 
>  the disk units somewhere, we just can't get to it).

This may answer one of the questions raised by my PC guru.

>  Also, OS/400 wouldn't let you access it anyway.  For security reasons.
>  Would you want someone to be able to find the salary report on the AS/400
>  and print it out?

Well we do.  Currently anyone with access to our ERP data can look at any 
report that the ERP generates & do as they please with it.  I accomplished 
this by giving spool file control to a user group that everyone is in, so 
that if management ever changes policy it will be easy to unimplement.

We are a relatively small shop (under 50 users) in which almost everyone 
wears several hats that cross departments.
Everyone within a department needs to be able to access the output of other 
people in their department.
Security wise I used to setup new users so they could only access, & mess up, 
their own stuff until there was a demonstration that they knew what they were 
doing with spool manipulation & needed access to other people stuff, but this 
led to a stream of complaints through management to me that I decided I did 
not need that hassle, so now everyone can see everyone's reports.  Actually 
we have had darn few accidents with people accidentally deleting what someone 
else needs, and I have managed to wean certain individuals off of locking the 
computer room door when they are printing some highly confidential stuff & 
thus drawing attention to the idea that there is something worth looking at.

From an internal security safety perspective I now focus on what I consider 
to be the high risk stuff in terms of overall disruption, like periodically 
reminding my boss that Year End is irreversable & half of our employees could 
run it simply by taking a wrong option off of a menu.  This can be fixed by 
me, but I have to be told which fiscal jobs should be secured to only be 
runnable by authorized individuals & the ERP security officers who can run 
any of the stuff regardless of security.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
AS/400 Data Manager & Programmer for BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 mixed mode (twinax 
interactive & batch) @ http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies - fax # 812-424-6838

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