snipped except for relevant passage to pass the overquoting rule..... > Another password problem I've seen, especially on single DBA sites, is > that only the DBA knows the passwords. What if he gets run over, > arrested on terrorism charges, rendered comatose, murdered or simply > goes on a 4 week holiday and is incommunicado? All important > passwords should be recorded and stored somewhere safe (a piece of > paper in an offsite secure location (e.g. where you keep your > disaster recovery backups). BTW, of those 5 examples of why a DBA > might not be available, murdered is that only one that hasn't happened > to a DBA I know (the arrest was found to be an error and he was > released). not necessarily a problem, at least not on Unix/Linux systems -- sysadmin logs in as root and does an "su - oracle" (or the name of the Oracle binaries owner)...... then does connect / as sysdba and can reset whatever passwords are needed. I had a sysadmin at a site once tell me that since I was the only DBA, for security reasons, I HAD to give him the password to the oracle account... in an email. I replied "you don't need it". He said "oh wait, you're right, that's not secure -- leave it to me in a voicemail" I replied again "you don't need it". And later, when there wasn't a crowd around, gently explained to him that as root, he had access to ANY account on the system... and so did not need the password. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l