RE: Windows DB best practices

Greetings,  

I had an interesting experience installing 10gR2 on Windows recently. The box is running Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition SP1. I was logged in as a user which was a member of the local administrators group and I installed the client, that is all I needed. I subsequently encountered difficulties with the networking piece, the reason I installed the client in the first place, which I was unable to resolve. I opened an SR with Oracle and was told that they have seen problems when the installation is done by a user other than the Administrator. I uninstalled everything, connected as the administrator account and everything worked. I don't know if this was actually the cause of the problem or Oracle not wanting to solve the real issues but it was an interesting situation. This is the second 10gR2 install I have done on Windows, the other worked fine and I did that under an account that was a member of the local administrators group. I don't know if I did something wrong or if there is something to this but perhaps worth keeping in mind.  

Thanks.  

Bill Wagman
Univ. of California at Davis
IET Campus Data Center
wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu
(530) 754-6208  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Niall Litchfield Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 11:15 AM To: andert_at_gmail.com
Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: Windows DB best practices

Hi Stephen,

In terms of security, what I recommend is the following - which assumes a single windows domain rather than workgroup or standalone server.

First create a global group (called DB Admins or similar). Assign membership of this group to the personal accounts of your DBAs (and no-one else - there should be no anonymous accounts in this group).

Next on each local machine make the global group a member of the local "administrators" security group. This will enable the designated dba to install Oracle. After the install is complete you should make the domain group a member of the local ORA_DBA security group created by the install, and optionally remove it from the local administrators group.

This gets you:

1. accountability - since everyone uses their own account.
2. groups used for the right things - local groups for access to resources, global groups for privileges for users.

I second the recommendation to make sure that you have a dedicated server for production oracle databases, but don't see that as a windows specific thing. I've also never worked anywhere that sys admins didn't share that view.

On 4/10/07, Stephen Andert <andert_at_gmail.com> wrote:

        Yes, I know the first one is "use *nix" but I am tired of fighting

        about it and my boss made the decision.         

	The main question I have is whether to create an oracle-specific
	account or just use an administrator account.  Also, any links
to 
	Windows best practices would be great.
	
	


	--

	Stephen
	http://andertfamily.net/racing_reports.aspx
	
	Any idiot can run.
	It takes a special kind of idiot to run a marathon. 


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-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info 

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