Newbie question on authentication

Hi, all

I'm new to Oracle and have problems with user accounts, roles and the like. My configuration is Oracle 8i on Windows NT 4. My init.ora contains the setting os_authent_prefix = "" and I have an NT group named ORA_DBA which was created at Oracle installation. The group contains the Domain Admins group and the Administrator account under which I'm currently logged in to NT. I'm working directly on the database server and I can use sqlplus by specifying internal/oracle or system/manager.

The Oracle documentation states that I should now be able to log in by specifying: connect / as sysdba. My first question is where should I type this in? sqlplus allows me to type this only when I have already started sqlplus. But to start sqlplus I have to specify a user name and password. So that's a circle. What I can do is:

sqlplus internal/oracle

And then

connect / as sysdba

But that leads to a message that I have insufficient user rights. I also tried to explicitly create the user Administrator in Oracle like this:

create user Administrator identified externally; grant create session to Administrator;

But still I cannot log in under this account. Not even by specifying my password although the documentation says that I should be able to log in even without using a password. Is it possible to work with Oracle without entering username and password? What is identified externally good for if not for that?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Received on Tue Nov 23 1999 - 10:03:16 CST