And no one is expecting IBM to give away a full function ESM but one that
worked with ALL of IBM's products, ie CMS,GCS,DIRMAINT etc., and provided
RACroute communication would be reasonable. I'm thinking along the lines of
the Basic Security Manager IBM delivers with VSE. Not the Cadillac of ESMs
but 'good enough' so some companies could avoid the expense of Top Secret or
some other ESM. With the RACroute interface a good programmer can build a
lot of support to fit the company's needs. 

-----Original Message-----
From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Behalf Of Alan Altmark
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 3:18 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: DIRMAINT authentication


On Tuesday, 12/11/2007 at 04:05 EST, Jim Bohnsack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:

> B) There "should" be no additional charge.  Not having to maintain
> separate authorization paradigms in each product just about has be less
> expensive for the vendor.  Certainly there would be an initial startup
> cost, but that should be able to be amortized in a short time and then
> it's all gravy :-)

I would expect a free ESM to simply perform the same authorization check 
that the individual products/features currently have, but have those 
authorizations in a single place.  The more granular checks I proposed 
would be something a real ESM would handle.  Further, there would be no 
connection to CP.

You could, of course, write your own ESM to replace the free one, but make 
sure that having a "roll your own" security manager is an acceptable 
policy in your shop. 

There is no way for IBM to give away a high-functioning ESM.  That would 
undermine the market for ESMs, upsetting both IBM and CA.

Alan Altmark
z/VM Development
IBM Endicott

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