Re: Emergemcy Chunks Offline - tbzero utility
Michael N. Vaughan (mvaughan@pamd.cig.mot.com) wrote: : Well said Kathy. We all want to point fingers for things we do not take the : time or effort to plan for or do. As DBA's it is our responsibilty to list the : reasons for management to purchase items like disk arrays so you can mirror a : database, extra tape units to keep the logs backuped, reduntant CPU's, etc, to : guard against various problems. : Regards, Having seen a ton of discussion regarding tbzero, down chunks, dial-ins, etc, I thought I would take the time to express MY opinions and thoughts on the matter, because I'm one of the people that dial into your systems and mark your chunks online. First, just to clarify a point, tbzero does nothing to bring your chunks online. Second, there's probably no way Informix would ever release our internal utilities to people because a) they can cause much more damage to your system than you probably realize, b) to understand the use of these utilities requires knowledge of our products at the source code level, and c) just as soon as someone used one of these utilities and mucked up his/her own system, we'd get the blame and the heat would be on us to fix the problem. Third, I can understand all the security concerns that people have. We have many customers with highly sensitive data, and have to deal with this on a regular basis. So, all that said, I have a question....to those of you with the sensitive data, under what conditions, if any, would you permit us to dial in to your systems? A secure modem? The ability to monitor our every keystroke? I ask because those of us in support have pondered ways to solve this problem, and we'd like to know what you think. For example, some of our customers with confidential data allow us to dial in through a PC with pc-anywhere, thereby giving themselves the opportunity to monitor our every move. Another customer has in the past provided us with a special modem that encrypts data before it gets onto the phone line. So please send me suggestions, I'm interested. ObDisclaimer: The views expressed above are the product of my own warped, twisted mind and do not (necessarily) represent the opinions of my employer, Informix Software, Inc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Glidden Sr. Advanced Support Engineer E-mail: glidden@informix.com Advanced Support (415) 926-6904 Informix Software, Inc. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------