I was looking at this article that I found via Informixcity (although it's probably been on here as well!)

"Informix seeks developers", it says, and then promptly goes on to say bugger-all about Informix seeking developers!

Well, I can attest that it's true that IBM, with Informix, is on a quest to find developers. I spend a large portion of my working life talking to people who have existing applications on other databases, who are considering migrating away from Oracle because Oracle now competes with them, or who want to move up from "personal databases" into the big leagues, or who want to use some killer aspect of our technology.

I mentioned this RedBook in one of my earlier posts and wanted to have a closer look at it.

I remember that when I looked at the contents originally, I was surprised to see no mention of physical and only a limited discussion of file system security. The only discussion relating to file system security was around backups.

In my opinion, another omission was that there is no suggestion made of what sort of things you should audit with the onaudit program.

Some of the options are presented to the reader without any real emphasis as to which is a better option. For example, there is no mention that regular DES encryption (as opposed to Triple-DES or DES3) is not a very good option. Although it is mentioned that Electronic Cook Book (ECB) cipher mode is easy to crack, it's also not very well highlighted and didn't jump out at me. (It will leap out at you if you scan the PDF for the string "ecb", but if you were reading the article normally, it certainly wouldn't, as it's in a section called "Sample Settings". :-) )

At those customers who are subject to regulatory compliance of some form or another, I always get asked about which operations need to be audited. There is no short answer to this, but courtesy of Jonathan Leffler, I have a script that a) does what Jonathan and I both agree is a bare minimum and b) is very easily modified with your specific requirements. It is posted below and I have also tried to attach it (which is a first for me!)

--- Cut here ---

#!/bin/ksh
#
# @(#)$Id: mkaudit.sh,v 1.2 2008/05/09 16:45:57 jleffler Exp $
#
# Create standardized Informix Audit Mnemonic Groupings