RE: "oracle" lockdown

  • From: "Herring, David" <HerringD@xxxxxxx>
  • To: "niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx" <niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx>, ORACLE-L <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 17:11:34 -0600

Thanks Niall for sharing helpful ideas.  I agree about "oraenv" and have been 
an advocate for using it even when there were issues with ulimit and missing 
"fi" in if tests.  I just fixed the code, raised SRs and moved on.

The problem related to cron is, I'm told it won't be allowed for any shared 
account.  For the most part I don't care as I've tried to force everyone to be 
using EM Jobs since we have agents everywhere.  The biggest issue then is 
healthchecks of EM itself, which would only be on EM servers.  Still working on 
that one.

Dave Herring

From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Niall Litchfield
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:27 AM
To: ORACLE-L
Subject: Fwd: "oracle" lockdown


oops - now sending to the list! 

I also forgot to mention, if this security initiative is in respect of an 
audit, make sure that your time/cost estimates for implementing this are 
realistic. You'll often find that this sort of thing is presented as a 
"no-brainer" to IT management and then you end up with 3-6 months of work off 
and on getting all your little local oddities sorted. At least if up front 
people know that this "simple change" will cost a lot in effort they'll pay 
better attention to the cost/benefit analysis. 


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Niall Litchfield <niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 9:23 AM
Subject: Re: "oracle" lockdown
To: zjworacle@xxxxxxxxx

On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 5:14 AM, Jinwen Zou <zjworacle@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
sudo is used to change the effitive uid/gid of the execute command.
If you want to run the .profile/.bash_profile and change HOME enviroment 
variables and get interactive shell etc, you can add -i option. Please check: 
http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?topic=sudo
But in Dave's case - the post that started this the interactive shell is 
specifically excluded - so sudo -i will not be permitted. 

I think Dave you will *mostly* be OK. 

I expect you are aware, but oraenv is explicitly designed to be callable from a 
shell script - set ORAENV_ASK=NO and of course pass ORACLE_SID in and you will 
get the Oracle environment setup correctly.<aside> it annoys me somewhat that 
so many people seem to have spent so much time reinventing oraenv </aside>. As 
others have said membership of the dba group and/or knowledge of the sysdba 
password if there is one ought to get you all the access for maintenance you 
require. 

You are likely still going to want to setup a generic account of some 
description on each server to run the maintenance tasks - this might well be 
the user you choose to install a management agent for EM as, but if you don't 
use EM then you'll want *somewhere* for cron jobs etc to run. You probably also 
want a centralized script repository rather than a per dba repository in 
everyones home directory, this account would be a good owner for that. 

I'd respectfully suggest that the answer to the interactive install problem is 
not to do any :) , home cloning, response files and silent install of patches 
as well as EM deployment procedures are all likely available to you. 

Two areas I think you may have issues with that I haven't yet seen mentioned. 

1) EM agents, you can and should set these up to run as a different user to the 
oracle software owner, but this isn't especially easy and I *think* some 
operations will require sudo access that you won't have. 
2) trace files. These you may not get access to and trace_files_public is 
horrible. 

finally gmail thinks Dave's domain is untrusted and so half of this 
conversation was sitting in my spam folder (in case anyone else has similar 
issues)     
    

 




-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info 
--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l


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