How can I secure my printers?
We are a fairly large shop, and have remote users that have their own printers. The other day, somebody printed a very sensitive report to another location. What can I do to secure our printers? I have looked high and low all over the Web and can't find anything that works. Can you give me something specific that will work?

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By default, users can only view or manipulate the spooled files that they have created. Whether someone can view or manage someone else's spooled file depends on two things -– whether the user has *SPLCTL and the security-relevant attributes of the OUTQ in which the spooled file resides.

If the user has *SPLCTL, you cannot prevent them from printing or viewing any spooled file. You should think of *SPLCTL as the "*ALLOBJ" of spooled files. Next, you need to look at the settings of the Display data (DSPDTA), Operator Control (OPRCTL) and the Authority to Check (AUTCHK) attributes of the outq. Chapter 6 of the iSeries Security Reference manual (available from the Information Center), as well as Chapter 9 in my book, Experts' Guide to OS/400 and i5/OS Security) provide charts explaining how these parameters work together as well as what happens if the user has *JOBCTL special authority.

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This was first published in January 2005

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