Oracle 10g Reports Server - problem authenticating against DB

Question

I have a problem with Oracle 10g Reports server authenticating against an Oracle RDBMS.
When I try to run reports, an authentication form screen is presented, with the password field empty (the URL in explorer that loads this page contains the username and DB instance, but is missing the password) and the following error message:
REP-51018: Need database user authentication
When the password is entered into the empty field in the form and submitted, another 2 authentication errors are given.
REP-51018: Need database user authentication
REP-12545: java.sql.SQLException: ORA-12545: Connect failed because target host or object does not exist
When the URL in the browser location field is manually altered to include the DB password, the reports are authenticated fine.
Any ideas which config file I should be looking in?
Any pointers would, of course, be much appreciated.
thanks,
Brian

Answer 1

Hello, i finally have discovered what was happening, it has to be with the way FreeBSD passes the password field. By default FreeBSD passes the password field with a '*' while Oracle Linux (and Red Hat clones) expect an 'x' to look into shadow maps (Linux uses the '*' character in the password file to not allow login to that user).
To solve it the password field served by the NIS server must be substituted, which is accomplished with nsswitch.conf and adding a line to the /etc/password file on the NIS Client, so the final files will look this way:
# nsswitch.conf (compat directive allows us to use the '+' sintaxis in /etc/passwd file)
passwd files compat
# /etc/passwd (just add at the end of file)
+:x:::::