--- On Fri, 6/26/09, Edward Jaffe <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Edward Jaffe <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: IBM Software Secure Support via USA Citizens > To: [email protected] > Date: Friday, June 26, 2009, 10:43 AM > Ed Gould wrote: > > I had a job interview about 20 years ago at a place in > California that handled top secret (and above data) all the > time. I asked how they contacted IBM for support and how > they handled dumps problems etc...The answer I got back was > that they didn't contact IBM and you were expected to figure > out the issue. I was at that time of the interview pretty > sure I was not interested in it so I asked but without > source how can you expect to figure out where the problem > was and even if you could how could you fix it without > telling IBM how to fix it. The answer was surprising > even to me. They said you don't. > > I shook my head and walked out and drove back to the > airport and took the plane back and was so disgusted with > myself for wasting my time on an interview that if I had > been given an outline of all the restrictions that would be > put on the job I would not have wasted my time. > > > > I have received dumps from top secret government > organizations (both domestic and foreign) that have been > programmatically redacted. The dumps were pre-formatted by > the customer (the output of various IPCS commands against > the original dump file). All names of things (userid, > system, sysplex, NJE node, JES member, etc.) in the dump > were replaced with the characters XXXX in both hex and > EBCDIC portions of each line. Amazingly, I have been able to > solve problems using such dumps! > Ed: Interesting thanks for the information. I am wondering how you handle stand alone dumps? I am not sure how anyone (thing?) could handle something like that or in a few cases GTF Trace . Both items would require a LOT of human checks, of course there is always the issue of a vendor needing to see X and X is a top secret "information". The vendor can just say well I cannot help the user as he refused (not a good word) to give ne the information I need to resolve the issue. I am suggesting that certain aspects of a dump or (anything else for that matter) would be indecipherable to most people (even a cryptologist ) but to a person with a background in IBM dumps would be pretty much understandable. Can you see a program written to process standalone dumps "tapes" that could make any sort of close guess to what fields are let alone bits in control blocks? I am pretty sure I cannot. Any program written probably would be on IBM's list of "must get" products. Ed ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
