Dan Riehl relishes his adventurous career. As a security guru, he fancies himself a treasure hunter who digs "deep in the bowels" of System i boxes to discover their configurations and patch their holes.

"Give me the keys to drive a system for a few minutes, and I can spot the big problems," Riehl says. "Give me four or five days, and I can find the real down-in-the dirt, nitty-gritty issues."

He first envisioned himself as a "computer cop," uncovering program manipulators engaged in fraud and other high-tech crimes. A long career later, Riehl's badge is for protecting clients around the globe from such hackers, preparing his customers for compliance audits, and, as a technical editor and writer for System iNEWS, sharing his expertise with the System i community.

The director of services for The PowerTech Group and also a part owner of the Seattle-area–based security solutions company, Riehl earned a community college degree in computer science in Missouri in his early 20s and joined the field as a mainframe CICS Cobol programmer. In 1982 he signed on with a school district that was converting from an IBM 360 card-based machine to a System/38.

Later, after serving as a project manager for a large company in Omaha, Riehl moved to Seattle to work for an IBM business partner just as the AS/400 debuted. He then founded his own consulting and training company, sold it, and eventually helped create PowerTech and its 400 School training component. Along the way, he was able to move with his family back to their home base in St. Louis.

Riehl first got involved in what was then NEWS 34/38 magazine in 1988, testing and repairing code for the Program of the Month column. A year later, he became an official technical editor and also began writing his own articles. After almost 20 years, his name is still on the masthead of what is now System iNEWS, and he has added the editorship of the twice-monthly System iNetwork Systems Management Newsletter and the authorship of a shelfful of popular books to his résumé.

As a technical editor, Riehl says, he strives to promote excellence. "I like to make sure that what we print in the magazine is interesting, is factually correct, makes sense, is logical, and represents a variety of perspectives and levels of experience." To new authors, he advises, "If you have something cool to share, send it in. If it's neat and really rings your bell, it's likely to be a subject other people want to know about."

Readers have enjoyed hundreds of Riehl's own articles. "I write the ones I'm passionate about," he notes. Many of his titles reflect the whimsy he enjoys adding: "The Hunt for the Mysterious Disk Eaters," "Where Oh Where Is the Infocenter Now," "Nefarious Masqueraders," "If the Auditors Don't Get You, the Boogie Man Will," and "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Query LPP."

Riehl has also written a couple of "big fat books" — AS/400 PowerTools, Volumes I and II. His other titles include Power Tips for OS/400 Security, The Desktop Guide to AS/400 Programmers' Tools, and the textbook Control Language Programming for the AS/400, which he co-authored with fellow technical editor Bryan Meyers in a short amount of time that he says involved "a ton of work."

He continues to write programs for security solutions and keeps his fingers in coding. "I can still code with the best of them . . . well, not the best of them," he confesses, pointing to fellow tech editors Scott Klement and Carsten Flensburg. To add to his busyness, Riehl offers quarterly training on i5/OS security to PowerTech customers and others in the System i community and teaches classes at gatherings such as COMMON.

Travel? It's part of the package. Riehl crisscrosses the country and occasionally ventures to Europe and Latin America. Most of his clients lack security experts and have often inherited security problems. "They are just fighting like crazy to keep their business applications running 24/7," he notes. "Often, they don't know what's safe and what isn't."

The need to comply with the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act is driving the entire computer community to secure its systems, according to Riehl. "You need to have the IT controls in place to assure that your financial reporting has not been tampered with. Otherwise the SEC can come down with some nasty penalties that include hefty fines and even jail time," he explains. Businesses also need to guard their private information or risk "bad press," lawsuits, and the huge cost of offering credit protection to customers after the fact. In addition to having to satisfy privacy laws, he says, companies must face new requirements from the payment card industry. "With IT security edicts coming down from the boardroom, right now is a great time for the security and auditing industry," Riehl adds.

Despite the compliance chaos, he finds it intriguing to create "treasure" maps of vulnerabilities in clients' systems. "If they want me to fix what I see, I can do that. Most often the problems can be repaired using a mixture of Powertech software and services."

Riehl hasn't always been smitten by computer intrigue. As a young man (born in Pittsburgh, raised for a while in Long Island, and growing up in St. Louis), his main interest was the Bible and the fellowship of teaching and working for the church. After reading books about hackers and hearing from a friend about the fun and economic rewards of technology, Riehl decided to make that his vocation while keeping the Bible "in its proper place, as number one."

For relaxation, he buys and sells U.S. coins and enjoys life in Missouri with his wife and their three grown children, one of whom lives in California. On a recent trip to New York to help a large company determine its security vulnerabilities, Riehl ended up just three miles from where he lived as a kid. He loved searching for the home his family had until he was in the third grade.

"I really enjoy what I am doing and don't know of anything that would be more fun," Riehl says. "I work with a lot of smart people for whom I have great respect. I like the fact that I can work out of my house when I'm not on the road." Secure in his current career and in the experiences of his past, he says he's ready for the next adventure.

Vicki Hamende is acquisitions editor for System iNEWS. To read more of her profiles of System iNEWS tech editors, click here.