I wanted to outline an interesting experience I had recently around security. Oracle, like a lot of companies requires their employees to regularly change their passwords as it is considered good security practice. There are strict rules around the password formats and their history. Luckily Oracle uses its own Identity Management solutions so the experience is simple and quick.
Recently my passwords were set to expire. I have a process I use to ensure the passwords are changed across all the technologies I use. I usually do that one morning a couple of days before they are due to expire. I did that this time at the end of the day, as it was a particularly busy day. It was a Friday and all was well..
Except I forgot one important change. My credentials in my demonstration instance of Oracle Enterprise Manager. I have a demonstration environment where I do research and development as well as record training and do demonstration against. After that weekend I logged to my demonstration environment to see alerts that it could not connect via some credentials.
I have three credentials to worry about in Oracle Enterprise Manager:
- There is a credential for Oracle Enterprise Manager to connect to My Oracle Support. This is used for checking patches, looking for critical advice as well as register Service Requests directly from Oracle Enterprise Manager in online mode. Typically, you would nominate an account to link to My Oracle Support (along with a Service Identifier for your site).
- I have two named credentials I use regularly for host interaction such as installations and running regular jobs on the machines. These are administration accounts used for the product at the operating system level. The way the machine is setup, I use two as one is the Administration account and the other is a privileged account used for low level administration. In some cases some sites will only need one per user.
I was able to correct the passwords and all my environments reported back correctly. Credential management is one of the strengths of Oracle Enterprise Manager. Next time I will add the OEM credentials to my checklist.
