Oracle 11g: Default case-sensitive passwords

Michael — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 10:18:33 +0000

ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied

Yiipiee… Although i created my schema with the usually scripts we use, i got a logon denied… Switching context from Oracle Forms 6 to Reports 6… (Please, don’t say anything about legacy apps).

I didn’t notify that passwords are now case-sensitive in a Oracle database (which is a good thing), because of two reasons: I created the user via SQL*Plus and there is a environment variable called “sqlcase” that converts, if set to upper or lower, all SQL code to the according case. Bummer! Even quoted literals are converted… Stupid shit, i think. But in my case, this thing was set to mixed, so i ended up with a lower case password as with 11g “sec_case_sensitive_logon” is set to true as default:

SQL> SHOW parameter sec_case_sensitive_logon
 
NAME                     TYPE    VALUE
------------------------ ------- -----
sec_case_sensitive_logon BOOLEAN TRUE

Now with forms things are different, again. Forms runtime don’t convert the lowercase password in the connect string so i could log in but it converts the password to uppercase if you switch contexts to Reports runtime which couldn’t connect and ended up with the ORA-01017. Weird stuff, as everything else worked as expected, although Forms and Reports 6 are ages old compared to 11g.

In the end, i changed to user to a an uppercase password, so the password passed from Forms to reports is the right one. I didn’t set sec_case_sensitive_logon to false, as i think, its way better to have standard password handling and to me, this means case-sensitive and nothing else.

I found some valuable information on this topic in the following blog: Mark A. Williams :: Blog, didn’t know about that sqlcase shit before.

For more information see:

Installing Oracle 11g Database on OEL5

Michael — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:06:09 +0000

As a last post in the series (1, 2, 3, 4): Installing the latest and greatest incarnation of the Oracle Database named “Oracle 11g” on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 running as a paravirtualized machine on Oracle VM Server.

Honestly, i was afraid of installing Oracle the first time under a linux environment but i must say, the installation was pleasantly easy, following the steps described here. No surprises at all. My host has a fixed IP adress, no problem with DHCP (although a don’t quite get why this should be any problem at all).

Fun started after stopping the database.

First: SELINUX is enabled per default under OEL5. I found the following tutorial which recommends turning SELINUX off. I disagree with that.

After installation complets, the following commands are necessary to enable Oracle to load its shared objects and to some text relocation with it:

chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /opt/app/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/lib/libnnz11.so
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /opt/app/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/lib/libclntsh.so.11
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /opt/app/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/lib/libnque11.so
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /opt/app/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/lib/libsqlplus.so

otherwise you’ll some errors like

/opt/app/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/bin/ocrconfig.bin: error while loading shared libraries: /opt/app/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/lib/libnnz11.so: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied

(Paths may vary) when starting the database.

Speaking of starting, Oracle comes with no batteries included, i.e. a startup script is missing.

I started with the one described here and added some lines to start the enterprise manager controll, see resources below.

In the meantime, the first import should be finished. The performance of 11g seems ok, on a virtual machine with a minimum of 1GB Ram. Maybe i’ll post some more impressions in a few weeks.

info.michael-simons.eu » 11g

Oracle 11g: Default case-sensitive passwords

Installing Oracle 11g Database on OEL5

Resources