Carol’s Top Five Favorite Security Enhancements in IBM i 7.5 and 7.4 TR6
The latest announcements from IBM contained many security enhancements and changes. Carol describes her faves.
An IBM announcement hasn’t contained this many security enhancements and changes to IBM i security in many years. You can find information on all enhancements and previous supported releases here.
QSECURITY Level 20 Cannot Be Specified
At IBM i 7.5, 20 is no longer a value that can be specified for the QSECURITY system value. The behavior is the same as when we took away the ability to specify level 10 when I was the IBM i Security Team Leader. If the system is at level 20 and is upgraded to IBM i 7.5, the system will remain at 20. But if you try to restore a system that was saved at level 20, the QSECURITY system value will remain at the value prior to the restore. For example, if the system was at the default value of 40, the QSECURITY system value will remain at 40 even though the saved value of QSECURITY was 20.
Unfortunately, numerous organizations still have systems running at level 20. I’m hoping this change will motivate those organizations to pay closer attention to security sooner rather than waiting to address it when they upgrade…