Long Password Support

The Personal Communications Data Transfer utility supports 128-character case-sensitive passwords, when connecting to an iSeries™, eServer™ i5, or System i5™ host running i5/OS™ or OS/400®, V5R1 or later. This functionality is determined by the OS/400® or i5/OS™ system value QPWDLVL. Refer to the iSeries Security Reference (SC41-5302) for details.

Prior to V5R1, OS/400® used DES (Digital Encryption Standard) encryption, which permitted 10-character uppercase passwords. The system value QPWDLVL is not enabled for those levels of OS/400®.

OS/400® (V5R1 and later) and i5/OS™ use Secure Hash Algorithm-1 (SHA-1) for password encryption. The system value QPWDLVL can be set to 2 or 3, which enables the longer case-sensitive, 128-character passwords. The additional QPWDLVL settings 0 and 1 allow backward compatibility with the emulator, using DES encryption.

Personal Communications can communicate with OS/400® and i5/OS™ hosts with QPWDLVL set to 2 or 3 (using SHA-1 encryption), or with QPWDLVL set to 0 or 1 (using DES encryption). Prior versions of Personal Communications interact properly with OS/400® or i5/OS™ only when QPWDLVL is set to 0 or 1 (DES encryption, short password).