Power

I'm trying to diagnose an issue that a user is having. The user is running an in-house developed utility that allows them to copy a spool file to create a PDF, and have emails it to themselves. The user I'm working with is getting an error. When I check the job log, I see an error that says, "Not authorized to spooled file". I checked the permissions on the output queue, and it seems to be fine.

My question is, if I enable authority collection for this user, and have them try running the program again will it tell me what this user needs? I've never used authority collections before, so I'm wondering if it will work with an object that is a spool file rather than a database table. 

We are running IBM i 7.5 on that partition with fairly recent PTFs.

My apologies if this is not the correct place to post this question. 

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Michael Soucy
Sr Midrange Engineer
Bangor Savings Bank
Bangor ME
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The user needs to have created the *SPLF or have special authority *SPLCTL through their own profile or a group profile.

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Patrick Kelly
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Hi Patrick,

Thank you for your reply. I figured out what the problem was. I compared the version of the program on our production system to the one on our testing / development partition. The one on production was using adopted authority and the user profile was *OWNER, but the one on the testing partition was *USER.  I changed it to match production and that fixed the issue.  

Funny thing is shortly after I posted this question, I got a notification that there was a new video recording from Scott Forstie and Tim Rowe on their COMMON iSee video blog. The topic was about the Authority Collection tool. I'm going to watch the videos to learn more about this product.

Have a great day!

Mike

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Michael Soucy
Sr Midrange Engineer
Bangor Savings Bank
Bangor ME
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Original Message:
Sent: Thu September 11, 2025 07:28 AM
From: Patrick Kelly
Subject: Using Authority Collection

The user needs to have created the *SPLF or have special authority *SPLCTL through their own profile or a group profile.

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Patrick Kelly
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Hello, 

To answer your question: "My question is, if I enable authority collection for this user, ....?"

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.5.0?topic=collection-special-considerations-authority

The authority collection support does NOT collect data that is related to interfaces that check special authority. Authority collection data that is related to *ALLOBJ special authority is collected as it affects object level security. Other special authority checks, such as *JOBCTL or *SAVSYS, do not generate authority collection entries.