Ask any security professional which area of IBM i security is most often ignored and chances are that the unanimous response is a chorus of “the Integrated File System.” Although it’s been around since V3R1, the Integrated File System, or IFS, remains a shrouded mystery that represents significant risk to many IBM i organizations.

You have the afternoon off—but not the responsibility of monitoring your system for issues. This includes responding to application and system messages as they occur on your production IBM i jobs. You don’t want to carry your laptop around just in case you need to VPN back to answer a message that is waiting on your month-end process. What option do you have?

A user’s ability to execute commands in a green-screen environment is controlled by the limit capabilities (LMTCPB) parameter on their profile. Although without exit programs to extend IBM i security functions, even limited capability users could invoke commands through network interfaces such as FTP.

Does this sound familiar? You recently experienced an “unplanned outage” after an administrator inadvertently issued a PWRDWNSYS command while mentoring a new operator.

As more applications on IBM i become Java- or web-based, they’re less likely to send their important messages to a message queue. But don’t worry—Robot Console has that covered.