Exchanging and accessing data between systems is often a requirement in today’s application programming assignments. Different options are readily available on the System i to accomplish this task, provided that a TCP/IP connection is configured between the systems in question. DDM (Distributed Data Management) files, DDM data queues and DRDA (Distributed Relational Database Architecture) using SQL are some of the built-in facilities that come to mind.
Apart from setting up and configuring the connection between the systems, there’s yet another challenge included when going down that road: How do you authenticate the user profile under which the connection will be established? Again, different options exist, but one of the most secure and flexible is offered by server authentication entries.
A server authentication entry is added for a local user profile. It specifies a remote server as the main attribute and contains the authentication information (user ID and optionally, a password) that is sent to the remote server when the local user profile is used to establish a connection to the remote server. One user profile can have any number of server authentication entries, but only one per server.
The Work with Server Authentication Entries (WRKSVRAUTE) command will help you stay on top your server authentication entries.
