Have you ever had the need for an IBM service technician to come into your shop to perform some type of maintenance on your iSeries? How about a consultant who you hired to work at your shop temporarily to help diagnose problems with your hardware or system software? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then chances are good that at some point those people needed to gain access to some of the low-level functions on your system that are only available through Service Tools. In the past, anyone with enough authority in their user profile could log on to your iSeries and issue the STRSST command and gain access to those functions. With the advent of OS/400 V5R1, IBM has given you the tools to allow you to control who gains access to Service Tools, when they can have that access, and what functions they can perform once they get started with the utility.

Through the use of Service Tools user profiles, you can gain complete control over the security of your system. In this video tutorial, industry expert Shannon O'Donnell takes you on a step-by-step journey through the creation and configuration of Service Tools user profiles.

Shannon O'Donnell is Director of New Technologies at Jano Justice Systems, Inc. and is a frequent contributor to many iSeries journals and online newsletters. Shannon can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Shannon O'Donnell has held a variety of positions, most of them as a consultant, in dozens of industries. This breadth of experience gives him insight into multiple aspects of how the AS/400 is used in the real world. Shannon continues to work as a consultant. He is an IBM Certified Professional--AS/400 RPG Programmer and the author of an industry-leading certification test for RPG IV programmers available from ReviewNet.net.