Password Change Causes Troubles

A tester tried to run a data load operation. It failed with some password error. My team mate asked me to help resolve the issue. Apparently somebody changed the password of an account that is used during the load process. Initially I got a hint that the password might be stored in a file somewhere on the server.


There was just a lot of pain helping out here. I got the hostname of the server from the tester. But I could not seem to resolve that hostname. I connected to another server, and it somehow could translate that hostname to an IP address. I logged into the server and found the directory where the job was running from.


I knew what the username of the database account was. So I searched all the files and found one property file that had the username and password. Then I took a while to track down somebody who knew the new password. The weird thing is that we store some sort of encrypted version of the password. How am I supposed to generate that?


Turns out there is a Java program on the server that will encrypt your password. I don't know what algorithm or parameters are used for the encryption. But I don't need to know if I have this program. The password had some weird symbol in it that initially prohibited me from providing the password to the encryption program.


I thought I was home free. Tried to update the property file with the new encrypted password. Nope. The property file was read only for everyone except the owner. And I don't have the password for the owner account. Man. Makes you want to just give up. I told the tester to go get us some help from some system administrators that would have access.