File Hiding utility (dbfhide)

The File Hiding utility dbfhide allows you to add simple encryption to configuration files and initialization files to hide the contents of each file.

dbfhide original-configuration-file encrypted-configuration-file

The following table lists the available options for the dbfhide utility.

Configuration files are used by some utilities to hold command-line options. These options can contain a password. You can use the dbfhide utility to add simple encryption to configuration files and .ini files used by Sybase IQ and its utilities, and thereby obfuscate the contents of the file. The original file will not be modified. Once you add simple encryption to a file, there is no way to remove it. To make changes to an obfuscated file, you must keep a copy of the original file that you can modify and obfuscate again.

In many cases, Sybase IQ expects an .ini file to have a particular name. When you want to add simple encryption to a file whose name is important (such as asaldap.ini), you must save a copy of the original file with a different name when you add simple encryption to the file. If you do not keep a copy of the original file, then you cannot modify the contents of the file once it has been obfuscated. The following steps explain how to add simple encryption to an .ini file.

1. Save the file with a different name.

   rename asaldap.ini asaldap.ini.org
   

2. Obfuscate the file with the File Hiding utility, giving the obfuscated file the required file name:

   dbfhide asaldap.ini.org asaldap.ini
   

3. Protect the asaldap.ini.org file using file system or operating system protection, or store the file in a secure location.

   To make a change to the asaldap.ini file, edit the asaldap.ini.org file and repeat step 2.

This utility does not accept the @data parameter to read in options from a configuration file.

Create a configuration file that starts the personal database server and the sample database. It should set a cache of 10MB, and name this instance of the personal server Elora. The configuration file would be written as follows:

# Configuration file for server Elora -n Elora -c 10M path\asademo.db

(Note that lines beginning with # are treated as comments.)

Name the file sample.txt. If you wanted to start the database using this configuration file, your command line would be:

start_asiq @sample.txt

Now, add simple encryption to the configuration.

dbfhide sample.txt encrypted_sample.txt

Use the encrypted_sample.txt file to start a database.

start_asiq @encrypted_sample.txt

For more information about encryption, see Encrypted Columns in Sybase IQ.

For more information about using configuration files, see the Sybase IQ Installation and Configuration Guide.

The following command adds simple encryption to the asaldap.ini file:

dbfhide asaldap.ini encrypted_asaldap.ini