Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Following good security practices on a single AS/400 or iSeries is tough enough, but when a company has additional remote servers to configure and monitor, the time and effort expended on security can add up in a hurry. To that end, PowerTech Group last week unveiled a new utility called PowerLock CentralAdmin that is designed to centralize much of the work of setting up security policies and watching for intruders on multiple boxes.

CentralAdmin is closely integrated with the other two OS/400 security products that are part of the company's PowerLock security suite. NetworkSecurity is PowerTech's access, monitor, and control system for detecting intrusions over networks and continuously monitoring transactions, while SecurityAudit is PowerTech's reporting tool for helping administrators to understand relevant security-related events and filter extraneous data that accumulates in the OS/400 audit journal.

With CentralAdmin, administrators can work with the NetworkSecurity and SecurityAudit software installed on multiple machines in remote locations, but from a centrally located server, eliminating the need to have trained personnel on site or the need to pay travel costs for systems administrator to get there. This ability to let one systems administrator handle more servers should help AS/400 shops that don't have an abundance of security skills on hand, said John Earl, chief technology officer of the Kent, Washington, company.

"There is a lack of trained security administrators in the industry to implement and maintain security systems. With PowerLock CentralAdmin, one security administrator can manage many systems and logical partitions from a single location," Earl stated in a press release.

CentralAdmin consists of client software that installs on the remotely located machines and server-side software that resides on the host machine. The software gives administrators the flexibility to customize their OS/400 servers' security rules as needs dictate. Administrators can make the same security rules apply to all remote sites or have a set of additional rules applied on top of these basic rules for one or more remote sites. Alternatively, administrators can configure different rules for all sites, centrally, from the CentralAdmin server.

CentralAdmin 1.1 is available now and requires OS/400 V4R4 on both client and server. Two OS/400 communication methods are supported by the utility, including Distributed Data Management (DDM) and Remote Package (*RMTPKG). For more information, visit the company's Web site, at www.powertechgroup.com.

In other PowerTech news, the company also announced last week it has formed a security partnership with Symatrix Technology, the Beaverton, Oregon, consultant and reseller of iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries hardware, software, and services that gained recognition earlier this year at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games, when it helped install Vision Solutions' high availability software for the Utah Department of Public Safety to ensure OS/400-based law enforcement databases would be available in the event of a disaster. Symatrix said most customers do not have the necessary skills in-house to secure their OS/400 server. As a result of this partnership, Symatrix will turn to PowerTech when its customers require OS/400 security software and expertise.