SSH for OS/390 (ODBC SSH-Tunneling to OS/390)

[Daragh Fitzpatrick]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the response. We're looking at about 7 different ways to skin
this cat, and will probably go with a Mainframe firewall if we can't get SSH
to work..

Cheers,

          :D

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Daragh Fitzpatrick        Daragh at UChicago.edu         (773) 702-8976

Solutions Architect                      NSIT Administrative Systems
Renewal Projects and Architecture              University of Chicago
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Let contacts update themselves - http://www.Plaxo.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Lindstrom [mailto:mouring at etoh.eviladmin.org] 
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2003 12:11 PM
To: Daragh Fitzpatrick
Cc: OpenSSH Development
Subject: Re: SSH for OS/390 (ODBC SSH-Tunneling to OS/390)


My knowledge of IBM hardware is weak at beast.  I know more about
AIX/pSeries (which is not much).  So regretfully I can't give you any direct
help.

And yes, ODBC may have blob types so it could heavily depend on the
encoding.  However, if you have non-OS/390 clients and you can do the
communications without SSH to secure it.  Then I would suspect the ODBC
connection would do the translation for you and it may not be an issue.

Any direct issues feel free to post.  We may be able to give you advice, but
I doubt anyone on the project team has an OS/390 box in their basement (and
heaven help us if we did =).

- Ben


On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Daragh Fitzpatrick wrote:

>
> Hi Martin,
>
> 	my name's Daragh, and I'm a renewal projects architect in the 
> University of Chicago. I saw your name on a listserv - 
> openssh-unix-dev. I was hoping you could lend some insight to a problem
we're trying to solve.
>
> 	We are trying to find a way for an Oracle database to connect 
> securely to a mainframe  (OS/390 running Model204 DB) through ODBC 
> (Open Database Connection protocol), which is session-based.
>
> 	The vendor that is providing the ODBC listener on the Mainframe side

> says they can provide SSL encryption as an alternative, but there are 
> no SSL-enabled ODBC drivers on the distributed side that we can find.
>
> 	We hoped we could use SSH-tunneling, but it appears the only 
> 'obvious' implementation has EBCDIC-ASCII issues, and so can't handle 
> binary (now, I don't know for sure that ODBC is binary, but I'm 
> hedging my bets.)
>
> 	I saw on a website that you have been looking at this, and I was 
> wondering if you have implemented it to a level which we can try it 
> out, or can point us in the right direction if we're going down the wrong
path...
>
> 	Many thanks in advance for any help you can give.
>
> Happy Holidays!
>
> Cheers,
>
>           :D
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Daragh Fitzpatrick        Daragh at UChicago.edu         (773) 702-8976
>
> Solutions Architect                      NSIT Administrative Systems
> Renewal Projects and Architecture              University of Chicago
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Let contacts update themselves - http://www.Plaxo.com
>