Pythian Group

The error message I received this morning trying to login at oracle.com was:

Your account has been locked for the next 3 hours due to too many invalid login attempts. Please try again later.

This was odd — I think I used the right password and I only did it once. Oh well, SSO on oracle.com has been behaving strangely these days (and I’m not even talking about availability of oracle.com itself).

Fortunately, there was a simple solution for this thanks to Simon Haslam who provided solution on Twitter. All you need to do is to use “Forgot password” functionality — this will do both, reset your password and unblock the account. The latter is a surprising side-effect for me and that’s why I didn’t even think about resetting my password in the first place.

Now, why would I blog about such a seemingly irrelevant issue? Since My Oracle Support (formerly Metalink) migrated to Single Sign-On integrated with oracle.com, you can’t access your Oracle support without a functioning oracle.com account. I don’t need to tell you what it means for a production DBA to loose access to Oracle support in critical times.

Update: You won’t be asked to reset your temporary password so you should change it yourself right away — remember that your new password is potentially compromised as it’s been sent using email which is not a secure media. To reset your account password go to your Account and click on “Change Password” in the top-right corner.

Thinking I had something new, I wrote this article about recovering deleted files. However, it turns out Frits Hoogland had already blogged about recovery of deleted files on linux, as Frits pointed out in a comment on my blog, where he also mentioned a metalink note on this matter.

The note ID is: 444749.1 “Retrieve deleted files on Unix / Linux using File Descriptors”. I went and looked into it and the procedure it describes.

Although it does explain how to recover the deleted file, this procedure will leave the database in an inconsistent state. It will corrupt your database. Queries will produce the wrong results randomly, depending on cache usage, how busy the database is, et cetera.

(Before you read the details, I would like to point out that this metalink note is not fully reviewed, as it states in the very beginning of the note:)

“This document is being delivered to you via Oracle Support’s Rapid Visibility (RaV) process, and therefore has not been subject to an independent technical review.”

Read the rest of this entry . . .