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Re: Autostart of Oracle Under Win2K

From: Howard J. Rogers <hjr_at_dizwell.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 08:17:08 +1000
Message-ID: <407db868$0$20347$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au>


Les wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I thought I understood how the passwords and password file works in
> Oracle, but yesterday I found out that I do not. Any insight into the
> following situation would be greatly appreciated.
>
> My Oracle server is version 8.0.5 and it is running on Windows 2000
> Server, SP 4.

Not a certified combination (8.1.6 was the first Oracle version certified for Win2000... so any problems you have are entirely to be expected!)

> I changed the passwords on my SYSTEM and SYS accounts in Oracle via
> Security Manager. I later found that my database was not auto
> starting after reboot. I could start Oracle and open the instance
> using svrmgr. Once I manually started the database, my applications
> worked fine. Then it hit me that I did not change the password in the
> strt<sid>.cmd file. I opened the cmd file and found the password
> being passed by the usrpwd parameter was my old SYSTEM account
> password. I changed the password to my new SYSTEM account password
> and rebooted. No luck. I changed my SYSTEM and SYS passwords back to
> what they were before and edited the strt<sid>.cmd file and then
> rebooted. No luck.
>
> This system is not yet in production

I have to say that I hope it never goes into production. That's a very old version of the database, running on a totally unsupported operating system!

>and I have a cold backup of all
> database files, including PWD<sid>.ORA, from about a week ago out on
> another disk. I made a copy of my current database files and then
> restored the backup copy of the database files. No luck. Since I was
> no better off with the backup copy of the database, I restored my
> current database. I made several changes to the database in the past
> week and did not want to loose these changes.
>
> It then dawned on me, for some reason, to copy the PWD<sid>.ORA file
> from my standby server. This installation consists of a hot server
> that is running and an identical server that is in standby mode. The
> two have identical software. I had changed the Oracle passwords on
> the hot server but not the standby server. I copied the PWD<sid>.ORA
> file from the standby server to the hot server and rebooted. The
> database auto started.
>
> Now that I have the database back to where I was before I changed the
> passwords, I would like to change the passwords again. It appears I
> have to change the passwords in the PWD<sid>.ORA file independent of
> the passwords changed via Security Manager. Is this correct?

I don't know about security manager, but I think the issue is rather more subtle than this. Your problem on Windows is that the *service* which is needed to provide the memory for an instance on Windows is created "knowing" SYS's password.

Doing it by hand, you would have issued the command

oradim -NEW -SID XXXX -INTPWD fred -pfile C:\xxx\initXXX.ora -STARTMODE auto

...and at that point you've just declared 'FRED' to be SYS's password as far as the service is concerned. If you now go and change SYS's password elsewhere, the poor service is going to be left out in the cold.

So you might try changing your SYS password again (forget about SYSTEM starting the database, because he's not a privileged user, so can't actually do it at the best of times), and then dropping and re-creating the service:

oradim -DELETE -SID XXXXX
oradim -NEW -SID XXXXX -INTPWD newpassword etc etc etc

And see how you get on.

I wouldn't necessarily claim omniscience on this point, however, on the grounds that I've always done O/S authentication on my Windows databases.

Regards
HJR Received on Wed Apr 14 2004 - 17:17:08 CDT

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