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        Oracle Security >> Oracle Security >> Changing SYSDBA passwords on RAC
        
(Message started by: Pete Finnigan on Nov 10^th, 2005, 12:10pm)

Title: Changing SYSDBA passwords on RAC
Post by Pete Finnigan on Nov 10^th, 2005, 12:10pm

Scenario: RAC and remote_login_passwordfile = exclusive

When a user with sysdba privilege changes password, it seems the only way to sync up with the password files (1 per instance) is to repeat the "ALTER USER xxx IDENTIFIED BY yyy" on a connection to each instance.

Is this the only way?

The SOX people want us to add a profile for DBAs that prohibits password reuse. Except now we lose the ability to sync up the password files as we can only change the password once.

Any comments or suggestions?
Or has anyone else already solved this problem?

Title: Re: Changing SYSDBA passwords on RAC
Post by Pete Finnigan on Nov 28^th, 2005, 5:42am

Well, I'm not surprised there were no takers for this. From my research, there is no solution but to relax the profile.

I did come up with a kludge/workaround but it's not pretty.

It goes like this.
Each dba has two accounts, say dberg (normal account) and dba_dberg (with sysdba).

We have a "policy" that :
1. the passwords for both accounts will always be the same
2. Passwords must be changed by a script.
The script will change dberg (abort on error) then dba_dberg and if that works, make the same password changes to the other 69 databases.
For RAC it will only change dberg once, but will continue the change to dba_dberg on each instance.

The first account, dberg has the strict profile (no password reuse) but dba_dberg has a more relaxed profile to allow muliple password changes - to sync the password files.

It's not a great solution, but with around 70 databases to manage, its workable.

David

Title: Re: Changing SYSDBA passwords on RAC
Post by Pete Finnigan on Nov 28^th, 2005, 3:01pm

We use a password file on a RAC system, but move it to shared storage.

Password file is created on one instance, moved to a shared area - ocfs, raw partition or some other shared cluster filesystem. Then a symlink on each RAC instance points to the shared password file.

This works well for us, password only needs to be changed once and can be used across RAC cluster.

cheers,
John