One of the biggest loophole that an Oracle database installation can have is Oracle Listener without a password. At the time of client server this fact somehow can be overlooked as we know who our user are, but now in days of web we don’t them so its becomes very important that we secure Oracle Listener.

Setting the password for the listener can be done in following three ways:

1. Editing the listener.ora file and setting the password in it.
2. Using LSNRCTL utility.
3. Through Oracle Graphical tools such as Net Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager and so on.

In this blog entry I will mainly concentrate on first two.

Under first method we can edit the listener.ora file and add the following line in it.

PASSWORDS_LISTENER = imergegroup and then restart the listener.

But the drawback with this method is that password is stored in plain text format without encryption.

In Second method, we can run LSNRCTL utility and then can give command as follows:

LSNRCTL>change_password

After it it will prompt your for old password, if it is there you can type in or press enter.

Then it will prompt you for the new password which you want to set and then press enter.

Then it will again prompt you to reenter the new password for confirmation and then press enter.

After this password will be changes for running instance or session of the listener.

If we want it applicable for all the future instance or session we need to save the configuration for future use as follows:

LSNRCTL> set password

LSNRCTL> save_config

One these steps are completed, if we open listener.ora file we will notice that same line as we add in first method is added but password is in encrypted format.

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Can someone who is using OAV for their production instances? I have it installed in my sand box. Would like to hear from someone who is already using it in production from their experiencce on what are the drawbacks and pit falls and advantages besides that are mentioned already?

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