Re: Help - How to recover dba password

<cservehk> wrote in message news:<3b7cca70$1_at_newsgate.hknet.com>...
> I have an oracle 8i install on win2k server.
> I hae nt admin password. a user account that connect to the oracle server.
> Can anyone help?

If you can connect with an Id that has DBA authority then you have the ability to alter the password for any user defined to the system:

"alter user bob identified by newpassword;"

If you want to know what the password is for an ID then you are out of luck because Oracle does not store the actual password, but instead stores the result of a hash of the userid/password combination. Oracle hashes the id/password passed on a logon attemp and compares the hash to the stored hash. If they match you are in. There is no way to reverse the hash (at least not for normal people).

You can try grep'ing through batch scripts, shells, and programs to see if it was imbedded anywhere where you can find it.

Good hunting.

• Mark D Powell --