RE: os accounts on windows servers

Most of the issues you mention have little or nothing to do with Oracle on Windows - but on Windows server management and how the "server guys" manage their operations.

I started out managing databases on Solaris 6 (I believe it was) and then onto RHEL 3 & 4, and now I'm in a Windows shop but I still keep up my Linux skills and when you manage your processes and operations right (applying patches etc), managing systems on Windows can be a great experience.

And for what it's worth, we run 9 Oracle instances on our Windows Active/Passive cluster with 64GB of RAM & 8 CPUs and the performance is fantastic.

The reasons for choosing 1 OS over another has little or nothing to do with the OS but with the processes and requirements of the shop in which it is configured.

Can the shop tolerate downtime for patches? Is the shop required to maintain a 99.999% availability SLA? All those other questions decide (or should decide) the OS choice that meets all (or most) of the business requirements!

Chris Taylor
Sr. Oracle DBA
Ingram Barge Company
Nashville, TN 37205
Office: 615-517-3355
Cell: 615-663-1673
Email: chris.taylor_at_ingrambarge.com<mailto:chris.taylor_at_ingrambarge.com>

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From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Guillermo Alan Bort Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 8:15 AM To: niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com
Cc: adar666_at_inter.net.il; ORACLE-L
Subject: Re: os accounts on windows servers

Something I'd keep in mind when installing oracle using an AD account is password security (expiration of the domain password) and to make sure that the software is set to run as LOCAL SYSTEM and not the DA account. That being said, I've performed the installation using an AD account several times and (at least the 11g installer) creates ORA_DBA group and the services are created to run with Local System... of course, you need to be part of the Local Administrator group, which is a good idea for the DBA to be and administrator in a DB server anyway (in windows, and windows only)

With all that being said, I feel it is my duty to recommend you to avoid using windows as a server when at all possible. I've working in fairly large environments with a lot of diversity, and it is my experience that everything is more diffucult on windows than on unix, starting with the damned SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES parameter in sqlnet.ora... Also, just as a thought, Oracle's development platform is Linux...

Oh, and when you have to do maintenance on a DB on a Windows server and the IT Security department tells you NOT to log in to ANY server using your AD account because there's a virus in the network and we need to contain it... and when they have to reboot a production DB server to apply a hotfix (which happens a lot more often than unix patches) or when they need to reboot the DB server because it's been up more than 90 days straight... well, that's when you know the platform you've chosen is probably not the wisest choice.

I am sorry, I do not want this to turn into an OS Flame war... but it's just as easy to install linux and far easier to manage in the long run...

hth
Alan.-

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 7:56 AM, Niall Litchfield <niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com<mailto:niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com>> wrote: The installer will create the ORA_DBA group and add the installing user to it if it doesn't exist - and last time I looked would add the installing user if the group existed but the user wasn't a member. I feel a blog article coming on - especially as you might not actually want the installing user to become sysdba on all databases on the server.

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Yechiel Adar <adar666_at_inter.net.il<mailto:adar666_at_inter.net.il>> wrote: No problem. All our installs are performed with domain accounts.

The account need to a member of local administrators and also a member of ORA_DBA group on the oracle server.

Yechiel

On 09/02/2011 00:07, Joe Smith wrote:
Where is there a document on setting up oracle users to administrator the database on Windows servers?

Our admin wants to use domain accounts with Active Directory , but that does not sound right to me.

I have looked on metalink and the install docs but have not found anything yet.

Can somebody point to a document?

--

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

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Thu Feb 10 2011 - 09:07:56 CST