RE: i5 Youngsters

[PaulMmn <PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike--

Cable swaps are changes... but one cable looks pretty much like 
another; they'll never spot the change.  (:

I hope that before you tossed the bad cable that you cut off at least 
one of the connectors!  Otherwise, someone will see the cable in the 
trash and wonder why someone's tossing out a 'perfectly good' cable, 
and return it to inventory to come back and bite you again!



8 people is enough to implement change control.  I hope you have a 
change management system in place-- and keep the programmers out of 
the production environment.

The biggest thing auditors like to see is restricted access to the 
live data.  All 8 of the iSeries folks should NOT be allowed to 
install changed programs in production!  It should be 2 people (so 
you at least have a backup).

And a change management system is as simple as locking the production 
source and object code so that programmers can read it and copy it to 
their own work library, but it takes one of the 2 'install-enabled' 
people to replace the production source and objects.

Production data should be locked so that it takes a production 
program to change data (ie "SuperUser" owns the data objects, and all 
programs are owned by and run as "SuperUser," but the Users have 
permission to run the programs.  This helps keep users from using PCs 
and ODBC & such to update files from their PCs.

We wrote a "quick and dirty" installer program to do the moves and 
adjust authority--  we wrote it Q&D because it wouldn't be around 
very long.  It's still with us after at least 15 years, so write 
carefully!   (:

We also have our own version of "movobj" that checks to see if the 
object already exists, and renames the old version before the move. 
It provides us with 3 old and 1 live version.  There's a version that 
does the same for source members as well.

But all of our Quick & Dirty stuff has been superseded by an 
"official" change management system that's used for (most) production 
environments.

--Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



At 12:02 PM -0500 1/16/08, Mike Cunningham wrote:
> p.s. Would swapping a network cable be considered a "change to the 
> environment"?  We had one go bad earlier this week that we just 
> plugged in a new one and tossed the old one. The only people who 
> knew it happened where me and the cisco tech who was helping me.