Excuse Me...Can You Hold this Secondary Partition While I Upgrade the Primary?

Hey, Joe:

I have an iSeries box with two logical partitions (LPARs) running OS/400 V4R5. Our shop needs to upgrade the primary partition to OS/400 V5R1, and we want to put the secondary partition on hold while the upgrade is occurring (we don't want the secondary to IPL every time we have to IPL the primary). How do I shut down the secondary partition and keep it down while I'm doing the upgrade?

-- Ralph

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Adding Subprocedures to a Service Program, Revisited

Hey, Ted:

Regarding your article, "Adding Subprocedures to a Service Program," there's a question I've always wondered about. Why is the *CURRENT/*PRV way of handling new exports so popular compared to the hard-coded signature method, where you only keep one export list, as shown in my example. You have to keep the exports in the same order and add news ones at the end anyway, so I don't see the advantage of using *PRV signatures.

-- Barbara Morris, RPG Compiler Development, IBM

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Reader Feedback and Insights: Security Flaws

The Validating a User Password sample program in the August 21 issue of Midrange Guru, OS/400 Edition, has some basic security flaws. As you said, the Check Password (CHKPWD) command can produce any of three messages (CPF2362, CPF2363, and CPF2364). The problem is that the program only monitors for one of those messages. The program works correctly for the CPF2362 message but it fails for the other two. When it gets either of these two error messages (because the user has intentionally given a bad password several times in a row) the program will function check and then end. This will allow any user to get at the function you were trying to protect with the password.

-- Ed Fishel