[Info-vax] Some part of VMS attempting to execute SYSUAF.DAT

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-01-19 10:08:48 +0000, GerMarsh said:

> On Monday, January 18, 2016 at 5:11:37 PM UTC, GerMarsh wrote:
>> I have seen an intermittent problem when a program using Websphere MQ 
>> routines attempts to execute the UAF data file. Bit like this...
>> ,,,
> IBM have responded and it seems that the Execute is used as part of 
> some VMS Ctrl function. I have found that execute is needed for 
> privileged read access to global sections though and MQ does have a lot 
> of them!

That seems questionable.  Yes, execute is needed on directories for 
certain sorts of file access.  Execute is not needed for read or write 
on a data file.  Most read or write would usually be via $acm[w, 
$getuai or $setuai calls, or maybe RMS calls if MQ needed access that 
wasn't available via $acm[w], or the $getuai or $setuai calls.

But more interesting and also relevant to the IBM support question, 
whatever MQ is trying to do here is clearly failing — on a 
properly-configured OpenVMS system.  MQ is also not generating any 
user-visible diagnostics for the failure.  Some MQ code is clearly 
recovering from this error, or is otherwise ignoring the error being 
returned to MQ.

> I still do not understand why it is attempting to run a data file.

This might be expected and harmless behavior, but it's definitely weird.

Might want to see if there are any subprocesses running DCL using 
accounting or auditing and see if you can identify what's being 
invoked.   I've seen command syntax errors cause this misbehavior — 
symbol substitution failures, for instance.   Also dig around for 
errors in any of the MQ logs.


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