Securing WAS, WPS, etc. for developers

I may ramble on this one but I am struggling with some ways to properly
secure things within WAS and WPS.  Right now I am working with WAS 6
(ND) and WPS (5.1.0.1).  

 

My first beef tends to be that within WAS it takes a high degree of
authority to allow someone to run the HTTP Admin Client - I am not aware
of any way to allow someone access to it but limit what they can do.
For example I want operators and sometimes even developers the ability
to take servers up or down and even make some changes.  My problem is
that I feel that certain things should not be open - there should be
some control on configurations.  And then if they have to have *IOSYSCFG
or other access I struggle with that.  It is such a hassle to allow that
and while I hate my auditors (if they would ever evaluate things from a
business cost/benefit vs. security standpoint and if they would ever
help solve a problem then I might like them) I have to agree with their
assessments about the impact of such a special authority.  And then I
have an issue between production, development, and test
servers/instances.  So it makes sense for someone to have more control
in a test server instance than in a production instance.  I can't figure
out how to meter out this authority.

 

My second beef is how to secure the IFS structure for these products.  I
am constantly getting requests for write or existence access to a number
of objects and with the directory structure of these products they can
exist all over the place.  I don't want to give the carte blanch type of
access but I can't have them restricted all the time either.

 

Has anyone spent any time trying to create a granular security
environment for WAS and had any success?

 

Michael Crump
Manager, Computing Services
Saint-Gobain Containers
1509 S. Macedonia Ave.
Muncie, IN 47302

(765)741-7696
(765)741-7012 f
(800)428-8642

"The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us
from the support of a cause we believe to be just" Abraham Lincoln