Problem login denied as sys as sydba

Question

Hi,
I was able to login as sys/passwd@dbname. But when I tried to connect sys/passwd@dbname as sysdba, I got this error :
ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied
I was doing this using SQL*Plus and on the server where the database resides.
I need to shutdown this database. As far as I know I need to connect "as sysdba", right?
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

There are two ways to connect to Oracle as sysdba:
1) through the network using a password file (indeed, when specifying a sid in the connect string you are always connecting this way)
2) internally
For 1) to work, you need to have a password file in place and grant the sysdba rights to the users that can be connected to as sysdba remotely. To do so, the init.ora file needs the setting:
remote_login_passwordfile = exclusive
and you need to use the
orapwd
utility to create the password file. The password file stores the username/password for all connections that may remotely connect as sysdba. When you grant sysdba to a user, this file gets updated. In your case, my guess is that file was not made for the ess04 database and was for the ess03 database. Thus you are left with the following option. :)
For 2) to work, you need to correctly identify your instance. An instance is identified by two things: an ORACLE_SID and an ORACLE_HOME. (reason for this is you can have multiple instances per oracle installation and you can have multiple oracle installations on 1 machine.) Identification can be done by 'normal' environment variables which can be set in
- your registry or
- your machines environment variables or
- your sessions environment variables.
The last is easiest and most flexible if you have multiple instances on 1 machine. Just do this:
set ORACLE_SID=ESS04
set ORACLE_HOME=c:\oracle\ora81  (where oracle is installed, not including the bin directory)
sqlplus /nolog
connect / as sysdbaThis last command basically connects internally using the environment settings and without using the password file. You can only do this as administrator (ORA_DBA group user) on the machine the instance is installed on. Once you can connect internally, you can set up your instance to also allow remote sysdba connections as described in item 1.
This is similar on Unix.
Hope this helps,
Lennert