External (OS) authentication Oracle 10

Question

Hi everyone.
I have an application which needs to authenticate with Oracle 10g using the operating system user and password. I started using ojdbc, but I kept getting an error because (I found out later) the thin client does not support null user or password.
Then I switched to OCI (classes12.zip), but now I get invalid user/password.
If I do it with sqlplus, it works fine:
$ sqlplus /
SQL*Plus: Release 10.1.0.3.0 - Production on Tue Jul 31 16:41:19 2007
Copyright (c) 1982, 2004, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.1.0.3.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options
SQL>This is my code:
import java.sql.*;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
public class OSTest{
        public static void main (String args []) throws SQLException{
                try {
                        Class.forName("oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver");
                } catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
                        System.err.println("Driver not found " +e.getMessage());
                        e.printStackTrace();
                String str = "jdbc:oracle:oci:@my_orcl";
                System.out.println("Connecting using " + str);
                DriverManager.setLogWriter(new PrintWriter(System.out));
                Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection (str, "", "");
}Somewhere I read that it was an Oracle 10 bug, but I did not find much information about it. Has anybody faced this problem before?
Hope you can help me figure it out.
Thank you very much.
Laura.

Answer 1

Thanks, jschell.
If there is no solution via JDBC driver, do you know
any other way I could achieve it?
I believe, as I already suggested, that there is some way in the database itself to promote OS users into the database permissions model.
Certainly if nothing else one could script that.
For example (please don't judge me too hard for my
proposal), I was thinking about retrieving the OS
user and password via Java and then opening a
connection to Oracle using that user and password,
but I have two problems:
* Using System class, I can get the user, but not the
password. Is there any possible way to do it with
Java?I doubt there is any way to do that using any API using any modern OS.
System user passwords are hashed. The original password does not exist anywhere.
And if that is a requirement of your system that it should be retrieving the password then it would suggest strongly to me that people responsible for the requirements do not understand security (even minimally) to be dictating how security should work.
* Even if I give the user and password to the oracle
connection, it tells me that there has been an
authentication error. I guess it happens because I am
not authenticating via OS, but only using the user
name and password that I know belong to the user.
Huh?
Oracle authenticates the user that you pass. If it knows that user then it works. If it doesn't, then it fails.
Or do you know about any other driver I can use?
Which wouldn't change how the database authenticates.
If I could, I would not use OS authentication, but it
is a requirement that I must fulfill. If I understood
your comment, jschell, you suggest not to use that
kind of authentication, but I did not understand why.
Could you please clarify it?Again because the permission model in Oracle is much more feature rich than that of the OS.
You can restrict access to just stored procs or even to a single stored proc for example. And there is no way you can do that via administering OS users.