RE: QUSER on ODBC requests -- MIDRANGE-L

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Well, the original message was posted by John Earl and he said it was one of
his customers machines.  If you, as an ISV or a consultant, went to your
customer and made this change, you could stop core business applications
from running.  If the %$#@ing computer isn't working then neither are your
employees, except the IT staff trying to figure out what happened.  What is
the dollar value associated that?  What are you going to tell the person
that approves your invoices?  "It's really a good thing.  Sorry you can't do
business but I found and fixed a big security problem for you.  Don't blame
me because you have stupid programmers."

I know that John wouldn't go and do something like this but nobody else
should either.

A trend that we are seeing more and more of is that the people in change of
administering the AS/400(s) are less and less technical.  The NT guy is now
in charge of the AS/400 and he/she doesn't know not to use Q profiles.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: bdietz@3x.com [SMTP:bdietz@3x.com]
> Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 11:55 AM
> To:   midrange-l@midrange.com
> Subject:      RE: QUSER on ODBC requests
>
>
> One vote for good one vote for bad.......any others?.......
>
> I lamented whether or not I would suggest changing the password, I had
> thought about just disabling the profile but thought it could cause other
> problems.
>
> I do not believe it is good practice to use ANY of the "Q" profiles for
> day-to-day activities.  These should be assigned to a profile created to
> meet company naming/authority standards.
>
> This was mearly a troubleshooting exersize.
>
> Bryan
>
> ========================================================
>
> GOOD IDEA!  My experience has been that administrators, not to mention
> managers, want to know if applications have hardcoded passwords.
>
> =========================================
>
> BAD IDEA.  If you change the password for QUSER and there are applications
> with user and password hardcoded then they will stop working.  Clearly you
> don't know if this is the case so how are you going to set the password
> back?
>
> ===========================================
>
>  John one way to check and see if it is really QUSER, Change the password
>  for QUSER.  If QUSER is hardcoded into a DSN or some such thing this
> would
>  surely break it.  You should then be able to narrow down what is
> happening.
>
>
>
>
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