Years ago, a large USA federal law enforcement agency (that goes by a 3 letter acronym) for that reason would not send us SYSMDUMPs, but only paper dumps.
Some poor "Special Agent" had to go through the dump with a permanent black ink marker and go over any identifiable information in the interpreted side. We always felt sorry for whoever that lucky person was, because he was working hard, doing as we were told, not knowing that we tech support people could still figure out what was there by looking at the hex portion. I had a colleague who went on site to a large USA customer whom I can neither confirm or deny, who debugged an installation problem by reading the error messages given to him on a piece of paper by the sergeant assigned to him. It took him about 12 hours before the product was finally installed. But this is a serious issue. I'll bet that there is no provision in (insert random alphabetic characters here) that allows this. Oh, and also, if you haven't thought about it - Windows has its automatic "phone home" in case of error. Think twice before telling it to send the error report. Later, Ray -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Thompson, Steve (SCI TW) Sent: Wednesday July 26 2006 08:34 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: snding svc dumps If you sanitize a dump you might find that you have killed information that the support persons might need. Suppose that you are running some product that has an encryption function and it fails. If you sanitize that dump, removing all the clear text, it may become impossible for the support people to figure out what was so special with your data that their code crashed. And if you are taking the IPCS type data (SVC DUMP and / or SYSMDUMP) and sanitizing it, IPCS may not function. That is, the support people may not be able to get IPCS to initialize your dump so that it can be read. Perhaps support contracts need to be reviewed to ensure that both parties (customer and vendor) are doing things that will comply with (whatever alphabet soup you want for secure data legislation that applies on whatever continent you are on/in). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
