ORACLE OPS$ Login Ids

[Chris Meech]

I'm doing a bit of searching about these ID's and came across this gem from an Oracle FAQ[^].

If you allow people to log in with OPS$ accounts from Windows Workstations, you cannot be
sure who they really are. With terminals, you can rely on operating system passwords, with
Windows, you cannot.

In the absense of an example, how does one intrepret this. Windows passwords are unreliable? What could someone possibly mean by that? :)

Chris Meech I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar] In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. [Yogi Berra]

[Mycroft Holmes]

The author was a nix nerd and nothing windows based has any validity. I wonder when that was written I assume the OPS$ id is like the sa in sql server and should not be available to users. Still the statement as such does not make sense. "If you set REMOTE_OS_AUTHENT=TRUE in your init.ora file, Oracle assumes that the remote OS has authenticated the user." This seems to imply they do not trust the authentication of the remote OS, surprise, surprise.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH

[Bernhard Hiller]

Mycroft Holmes wrote:

I wonder when that was written

Oracle is still from a world far behind. Even the latest version cannot be installed into C:\Program Files\. So I guess it was written back in the Windows 3.1 era.