I had the same problem recently. Try setting the LOCAL environment variable to your SID name. John Smiley --- snip --- I'm a *nix command line type DBA who has next to no experience directly supporting Oracle on Windoze. I get logged onto the DB server system as "administrator" & this account supposedly was used to install Oracle. However when I open up a command window & invoke SQL*PLUS and then / as sysdba The error message reports I have insufficient privileges. How do I get into this DB as "SYS"? -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l