Re: New Password rules at VRM610

On 22/04/2008, at 12:23 PM, Leif Svalgaard wrote:

QPWDLMTCHR allows you to force omission of certain characters from
passwords (typically vowels) but I cannot see a similar function in
the new rules.

And for a very good reason as it is a silly facility to have. Every time you
remove symbols from key, the key-space gets smaller, thus weakening
the encryption. I guess IBM finally wizened up.

Hasn't really answered my question though has it? Yes it can reduce the key-space but that decision should be up to the system/security administrator. Removing vowels was a good way of removing easily guess-able passwords. It also helps make a dictionary attack a bit harder. As we all know 10-character passwords are not terribly secure regardless of the key-space. With the new 128-character pass-phrases that becomes less of an issue.

Anyway, that's not my immediate concern. It is simply that setting QPDWRULES to *PWDSYSVAL (which is the default) allows QPWDLMTCHR to be in effect just at is is on pre-VRM610 systems. Once you set QPWDRULES to anything else there appears to be no way to implement the QPWDLMTCHR rule except via an exit program. Therefore, regardless of what you think of the feature, a feature has been removed and that's not usually done without documentation explicitly saying so. I cannot find such documentation hence my question.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
FlyByNight Software OS/400, i5/OS Technical Specialists

http://www.flybynight.com.au/
Phone: +61 2 6657 8251 Mobile: +61 0411 091 400 /"\
Fax: +61 2 6657 8251 \ /
X
ASCII Ribbon campaign against HTML E-Mail / \
--------------------------------------------------------------------