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TN3270 and TN5250 Considerations › Support for TN5250 Auto Sign-On

Support for TN5250 Auto Sign-On

IBM i5 (iSeries) Operating System's support a feature called "Auto Sign-On". The purpose of this feature is to allow a login to bypass the I5/OS initial sign-on screen. Also, several additional startup options (library name, menu name and initial program) and be specified that will run at sign-on time and take the screen directly to the given menu or run the given program.

In order to enable auto sign-on, check the Enable Auto Sign-on checkbox on the 5250 Session Settings dialog and specify at least a user ID and password.

Note: The user ID and password values specified on this dialgog are re-loaded from configuration every time CA Automation Point tries to connect to the session. In other words, changes made to these fields are applied immediately and do not require a restart of the Automation Point Desktop.

Auto Sign-on supports three different password encryption techniques:

Plaintext

Indicates that the password is sent in clear text (i.e., not encrypted) to the i5/OS host.

Standard

Indicates that the password will be encrypted using the DES* encryption technique before it is sent to the i5/OS host.

Elevated

Indicates that the password will be encrypted using the SHA encryption technique before it is sent to the i5/OS host.

Note: For a detailed description of these encryption algorithms, see section 5 of IBM document RFC 4777.

You decide how to encrypt the password by first determining how the i5/OS host has Password Level configured.

Note: To understand how Password Level effects your decision about which encryption to use for Auto Sign-on, see IBM's documentation on Password Level and QPWDLVL.

To query the current host value for QPWDLVL, issue the following i5/OS command:

WRKSYSVAL QPWDLVL

Possible returned values are:

QPWDLVL 0 or 1

Password length is restricted to 10 characters. CA Automation Point can use Plaintext or Standard encryption. Elevated encryption does not work with this host.

QPWDLVL 2 or 3

Password length can be up to 128 characters and are case sensitive. CA Automation Point can use Plaintext or Elevated encryption. Standard encryption does not work with this host.