NRS6320: Using &TICKET for RACF PassTicket support

Commentary

Tuesday, December 6, 2016 at 07:47:01 am    Client was able to capture (VTAM Buffer Trace) a successful signon to CICS using a CICS TND selection to provide the userid and password via SSI concepts and an unsuccessful attempt using another CICS TND selection to provide the userid and 'passticket' which TND is providing as today's date truncated to 8 characters. However, the attempt with the passticket did not produce the desired automated logon result.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016 at 09:10:11 am    Dug into TNDVAR's routine to process &TICKET and it appears the call to RCVTPTGN to obtain the PassTicket from RACF was stubbed out. Have requested the Client DUMP TNDVAR and, specifically, the TICKET routine's HEX so I can confirm this.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016 at 08:54:59 am    Client sent back DUMP of TNDVAR+BCE and ICM instruction of BF2F C72C exists (a Load of PDAF0 instead of RCVTPTGN). Theory is that in 1997 RACF's PassTicket routine wasn't properly operational and we abandoned efforts to confirm it's operation pre 4.2.3 release (with the theory being we'd return to it in the future because we wanted PassTicket support in the product). Have described the problem to the Client and offered a PTF to properly invoke the PassTicket routine. Have NOT verified that the PassTicket routine's calling parameter list, etc. are unchanged from 1997, so there could be more "wrinkles" associated with a PTF to activate this.

Friday, January 13, 2017 at 10:50:57 am    Worked up PTF TND42354 to try to correct TNDVAR's processing of &TICKET. Sadly, we don't have available a test environment that permits proper testing/validation of the invocation of RACF PassTicket. First effort to correct TNDVAR via PTF produced no improvement, but I traced it to an errant entry in the NRSVAR table buried in TNDVAR. PTF adjusted to handle this error and client sent the PTF for verification.