Autostart of Oracle Under Win2K

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.

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 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?

Thanks,

Les Received on Wed Apr 14 2004 - 11:40:50 CDT