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If like us you are dealing with multiple systems and use the save and restore process to keep things in sync you may have a shock when you look at some objects. The SAVRST process does not restore all object attributes if the object already exists, the ALLOBJDIFF *ALL does not affect every attribute! We have found a number of important attributes which we feel should be restored when you carry out a restore but they are not, after all the main reason you restore anything is to bring it back to its saved state??
Couple of important ones we have come across.
Audit settings.
When you save an object which has system auditing set and restore it you would expect the audit setting to be preserved on the restored object, its not! Obviously the audit setting cannot be set if the Audit Journal has not been set up but when it is the restore should certainly preserve the setting.
Journal information.
This is an important attribute for those running HA, but if the object exists and it is not journalled the restore will leave journalling off, it wont even restore the last journalled information.
Journal ID.
This is another important attribute, even if you rely on a save and restore process to keep a warm copy if the existing object exists the journal ID will not be set by the restore process. The only time this is important is when you use the APYJRNCHG command as this is the link the OS uses to apply any changes to the object, if it is not the same as the entry in the journal the object is not updated. Even worse the system does not let you know it did not find the object to update.
Object attributes.
This is particularly important for IFS objects as these are the security settings for the object (dwrxwrxwrx etc.) This is an obvious exposure because you could change the attributes on the source system and expect those changes to be reflected on the target when you restore the object.
There is a way around this though, if you delete the object before you do the restore the attributes from the saved object are correctly restored at the same time. We have adjusted our replication processes to make sure we take this into account as we replicate any object through the save and restore process.
Chris…