change a member in PDS without showing USER ID

sabar · New User Joined: 23 Jan 2006 Posts: 1

Hi ALL

Could you please tell me f someone could change my member in PDS without showing his user id ? and is it possible if he use virtual machine to access mainframe? and how i can know if someone change a member in PDS even it showing my user id?

dbzTHEdinosauer · Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 1:09 am

since you (anyone with update authority) can change the user id attribute of a member of a pds to virtually anything
via the ISPF option 3.5
it is a waste of time to expect any type of control over pds's via the user id.

Robert Sample · Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 1:12 am

PDS statistics, including user id, are generated and maintained by ISPF within TSO. If you don't use ISPF to update the PDS member, then most likely the user id that made the change would not be recorded -- no matter where the changes came from.

And unless you -- or someone -- analyzes the SMF data (which in itself is NOT a trivial task unless your site uses one of the SMF analysis tools such as MXG), it is not possible in general to know if someone changed a PDS member. If this is a concern of yours, you need to talk to your site security group about restricting access to that PDS. When there's a good business reason for doing so, site security groups usually have no problems with making such changes.

Pandora-Box · Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 12:13 pm

As far as security is concerned it is a bad way

I have seen places where the last modified person gets all bashing (Which was against his knowledge) for some bad codes written initially created by him or her as reviewer would blindly by userid

Why bother who did this / that when they cant modify?

Just a thought