Impact of Doing a Temporary Shutdown/Restart of Top Secret

Products

• Cleanup
• WEB ADMINISTRATOR FOR TOP SECRET
• Top Secret
• Top Secret - LDAP
• Top Secret - VSE

Issue/Introduction

What is the impact of doing a temporary shutdown and restart of Top Secret without doing a system IPL?

Environment

Release: Top Secret 16.0
Component: TSSMVS

Resolution

After the temporary shutdown, while Top Secret is down:

• Anyone currently signed on (or any batch job currently running) will continue to process normally, since the user's security record is still in memory.
  
  
• Any new initiations (signons, batch submits, etc), will go by the DOWN control option in Top Secret. The DOWN control option sets how security checks are handled, when Top Secret is 'down'. The default DOWN control option is set to DOWN(BW,SB,TW,OW).
  
  
• BW - Batch jobs and password changes (B) will wait for Top Secret to be reactivated (W).
  
  
• SB - STC initiations (S) will bypass security checking (B).
  
  
• TW - TSO logons and password changes (T) will wait for Top Secret to be reactivated (W).
  
  
• OW - Other online initiations (signons) and password changes (O) will wait for Top Secret to be reactivated (W).

For example, when a user tries to sign on to CICS while Top Secret is down, what will happen depends on the DOWN option Ox setting. The default is DOWN(OW) which will cause the online initiation (signon) (and password change if there is one attempted) to wait for Top Secret to come back up. The other DOWN options for O are:

B (Bypass) - Bypass security checking. Does not invoke Top Secret until restarted.

F (Fail) - Fail the request.

N (Normal) - Revert to native security (if any) until Top Secret is restarted.

Normally a temporary shutdown and restart of Top Secret takes a very short time, so setting OW so online signons wait does not have much of an impact since Top Secret should be up and running again shortly.

Most sites use the default DOWN options is because:

• With Top Secret down, new initiations can't use Top Secret security, because Top Secret is not up.
  
  
• Therefore, it is recommended that everything wait for Top Secret to come back up except started tasks (STC).
  
  
• STC is not recommended to be set to WAIT because Top Secret is started as an STC. So, if STCs are set to WAIT, the Top Secret STC can't start, until Top Secret is up. This becomes a gridlock situation.

Additional Information

DOWN Control Option