psw@WOLFGANG.MITRE.ORG (Phil Wherry) (07/21/87)
I've found an interesting use for the VMS security auditing functions that I thought I'd pass along -- recent messages about having problems with file protections reminded me that I should share this littly trick. If you are having problems with a product and suspect that it's having problems accessing some file due to protection problems, try turning on auditing for file access failures with SET AUDIT/ALARM/ENABLE=FILE:FAIL. This will kick off a message on the console when a process encounters a protection problem. The message printed will include the name of the file, the name of the facility requesting access, and the type of access that was requested and denied. Though the immediate applicability of this feature is obviously security-related, I've found it a useful debugging tool as well. Hope this helps some of you. Phil Wherry