MacLochlainns Weblog

This blog entry shows you how to reset the system password for an Oracle Database. It uses a Linux image running Oracle Database 11g Express Edition. It assumes the student user is the sudoer user.

After you sign on to the student user account, you open a Terminal session and you should see the following:

[student@localhost python]$

The oracle user account should be configured to prevent a login. So, you should use the su command or sudo command to open a terminal shell as the root user.

[student@localhost python]$ sudo sh
[sudo] password for student:

As the root user, you can login as the oracle user with the following command:

su - oracle

and, you should see the following prompt. You can see the present working directory (pwd) with the pwd command:

-bash-4.2$ pwd
/u01/app/oracle

You need to source the oracle_env.sh shell file created by the installation of the Oracle Database during the installation. You have two approaches to source the environment file, the first approach is with a dot (.), like

. /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe/bin/oracle_env.sh

or, this

source /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe/bin/oracle_env.sh

The oracle_env.sh file contains the following:

export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe
export ORACLE_SID=XE
export NLS_LANG=`$ORACLE_HOME/bin/nls_lang.sh`
export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH

Now, you can connect to the Oracle Database as the internal user with the following command:

sqlplus / as sysdba

Once connected as the internal user, you can reset the system user’s password to “cangetin” with this command:

ALTER USER system IDENTIFIED BY cangetin;

At this point, you can also stop and start the database. You stop the database with this command:

shutdown immediate

You can then start the database with this command:

startup

After setting the system user password, sign out of SQL*Plus. Then, you can type two exits to return to the student user account, like this:

-bash-4.2$ exit
logout
sh-4.2# exit
exit
[student@localhost python]$

As always, I hope this helps those who need to reset the system password when they don’t know what it was to begin with.