Versions 7.1.8 and 8.1.3 of WDSF/ADSM/TSM/SP have now been made available containing substantial security upgrades. A bunch of security advisories were sent this week containing details of the vulnerabilities patched. Some are serious; our security folks are pushing to get patches applied.
For the sake of discussion, I will simply call versions 7.1.7 and before and 8.1.1 "Old", and I'll call 7.1.8 and 8.1.3 "New". (Not really sure where 8.1.2 falls, because some of the security issues are only fixed in 8.1.3.) There are some totally unclear details outlined in http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg22004844. What's most unclear is how to upgrade a complex, multi-server, library-manager configuration. It appears from this document, that you must jump all in at once, and upgrade all servers and clients from Old to New at the same time. That is simply impractical. There is extensive discussion of the new SESSIONSECURITY parameter, but no discussion of what happens when connecting to an Old client or server that does not even have the SESSIONSECURITY parameter. We have 4 TSM servers. One is a library manager. Two of them are clients of the manager. The 4th server manages its tapes by itself, though it still communicates with all the other servers. That 4th server, the independent one, is what I'm going to upgrade first, because it is the easiest. All our clients are Old. The question is, what's going to happen next? Will this one New server still be able communicate with the other Old servers? Once my administrator id connects to a New server, this document says that my admin id can no longer connect to Old servers. (SESSIONSECURITY is automatically changed to STRICT.) Or does that restriction only apply if I connect from a New client? This could be an issue since I regularly connect to all servers in a normal day's work. We also have automated scripts driven by cron that fetch information from each of the servers. The bypass of creating another administrator ID is also not practical, because that would involve tracking down and changing all of these cron-driven scripts. So, the question here is, at the intermediate phase where some servers are Old and some New, can I circumvent this Old/New administrator ID issue by only connecting using dsmadmc on Old clients? This has also got to have an impact on users of software like Servergraph. There's also the issue of having to manually configure certificates between our library managers and library clients, but at least the steps to do that are listed in that document. (Comments? Circumventions?) We're plunging ahead regardless, because of a general policy to apply patches quickly for all published security issues. (Like Equifax didn't do for Apache.) I'm trying to figure this out fast, because we're doing it this coming weekend. I'm sure there are parts of this I don't understand. I'm trying to figure out how ugly it's going to be. Roger Deschner University of Illinois at Chicago [email protected] ======I have not lost my mind -- it is backed up on tape somewhere.=====
