Password and Login Woes

A couple things have changed in our system. The big change is a move to Oracle 11g on the back end. The security folks also changed our password validation function. The end result is that new accounts and old ones that get their password changed get locked. Doh.

Our apps rely on the Oracle 10g client on the workstation. We use the Oracle provider to manage accounts whose passwords expire. The password change dialog comes up automatically when the password has expired. New accounts get set with a temporary password which starts out expired.

Now when our users try to change their password in these scenarios, the password change hangs. Dang. Some DBAs and testers tried to do some debugging of this problem. At first they thought it was the new password verification function. However the problem persisted when those changes were backed out. Now a developer needs to get in there and figure out what is wrong.