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A program to facilitate decentralized RACF
administration
This article describes the MCINTY program, which was developed to
help with decentralized RACF administration.
The MCINTY program was developed to help with decentralized
RACF administration. This can be difficult to implement using the
standard RACF commands because their authorization checks are
rather inflexible, don’t provide enough granularity, and have no easy
dialog interface.
The program addresses these problems and also enables the installation
to easily store and retrieve its own additional information in RACF
profiles by using the userdata fields. These fields are extremely useful
but cannot be accessed using any IBM-supplied RACF commands;
they’re specifically defined by IBM for installation use.
USE RDATA
Details of the userdata structures can be found in the section entitled
‘Special fields’ below. Note that USERDATA is completely different
and separate from INSTALLATION DATA, which is displayed and
maintained by the standard RACF commands.
Userdata can be stored in any profile in any class, not just user profiles.
Retrieved fields are put into CLIST variables, which makes it easy to
implement a dialog-based administration interface using CLIST or
REXX.
Decentralized administrators can be given the authority to retrieve
specific fields in profiles to which they have ‘MCINTY’ access by
extending the standard RACF controls while still retaining sufficient
control to ensure the integrity of the system and the data.
Only user-defined extensions (held in userdata fields) can be
UPDATED, whereas READ access can selectively be given to any
information the installation chooses (above and beyond that normally
allowed using standard RACF commands).
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