Tommy, If you are having issues getting your management to support activating TCP/IP on your mainframe for "security reasons," I (or one of my colleagues) would be happy to have a conversation about why that is not typically a wise policy restriction.
I did encounter a company, in Asia, which had this policy up until about one or two years ago. As a consequence, in order to keep their business running this company's IT department implemented about 20 Microsoft Windows servers, and those servers did nothing except convert TCP/IP to SNA and back. Also, the typical "security" pattern was to allow those Windows servers 100% unhindered access to all mainframe resources (typically CICS) as "trusted gateways," because they didn't know how (or couldn't) establish a proper authorization and authentication architecture. In other words, the "mainframe TCP/IP is banned for security reasons" policy had exactly (and completely) the opposite impact: this company was extraordinarily vulnerable to hackers. Any hacker which could compromise even one of their Windows gateways -- which isn't typically very hard -- would have had complete and total access to their mainframe-based applications and data. Perhaps your company has similar (and serious) vulnerabilities if you have this policy. I hope not. Now, to answer your question directly (and in addition to the suggestions previously offered), you may also wish to consider MQ-based file transfer. (MQ can operate over TCP/IP and SNA protocols, among others.) Examples include IBM's recently announced WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition and Metastorm's PM4Data. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
