Automating SSHD startup

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We use the Zend Studio for PHP development to the IBM ‘i’ system which offers a number of options for connecting to the IFS where the source files exist for the websites served. Having tried a number of options the best solution for us was the SSH approach, this requires the installation and configuration of the SSHD server on the IBM ‘i’ which is part of the 5733SC1 LPP. you can find out how to install and configure the SSHD server here.

The next stage was to create a set up where the SSHD server could be started automatically everytime the system was IPL’d. Here are the steps we took to create the environment which allows this to happen.

First we needed a User Profile which would have sufficient authority to run the Deamon, we found that *ALLOBJ was required so created a user profile using the following command.
CRTUSRPRF USRPRF(SSHDUSR) PASSWORD(*NONE) STATUS(*DISABLED) SPCAUT(*ALLOBJ) This creates a user profile which cannot be used to sign on as the password is set to *NONE plus it is disabled.

Next we needed to create a subsystem description which could be used to run the Daemon job in, we created a subsystem in our system library using the following command.
CRTSBSD SBSD(SASLIB/SSHSBS) POOLS((1 *BASE)) This is a fairly simple setup so we did not get too fancy on creating the subsystem with separate memory pools etc.
As we wanted to have the SSHD Daemon job start up automatically with the sub system we created a Job Description and attached it to the subsystem as the autostart job.
CHGJOBD JOBD(SASLIB/SSHJOBD) TEXT('Job description for SSHD autostart job') RQSDTA('CALL PGM(QP2SHELL) PARM(''/QOpenSys/usr/sbin/sshd'')')
The Job Description required a Job Queue which we created as a standard Job Queue.
To add the Auto Start Job Entry we used the following command
ADDAJE SBSD(SASLIB/SSHSBS) JOB(SSHD) JOBD(SASLIB/SSHJOBD)
We also added a job queue entry for the job queue and the routing entry ADDRTGE SBSD(SASLIB/SSHSBS) SEQNBR(1) CMPVAL(*ANY) PGM(QCMD).

Once we did all of that a simple test was to try starting the subsystem and making sure the Daemon job loaded before adding the subsystem startup the the QSTRUP program.

Chris…