My Alma Mater is Rising - Now 13th Worldwide

My alma mater, Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland at College Park has been rising steadily in the ranking charts in last few years. Not only has the U.S. News & World Report survey this spring ranked the Clark School 10th in the nation among public engineering schools and 16th among all engineering schools, but the Princeton Review has ranked us 6th in the nation and the Institute of Higher Education and Center for World-Class Universities has ranked us 13th worldwide. Nariman Farvardin, Dean, Clark School, predicts that this trend will steadily continue, culminating in Clark’s arrival among the top 5 public programs in the nation. I would say that Nariman you are on the track.

Kalido Setup and Default Passwords of Oracle Schemas

When setting up Kalido for the first time it asks you to create a number of schemas in the database. It also expects them to have default passwords, e.g. goldeneyex for WHSUSR or gatekeeper for GATEKEEPER schema.

However, there are strict password guidelines these days in almost every organization. A strict DBA group would never let you have the kind of passwords mentioned above. If DBAs do decide to have difference passwords for these schemas then it would be a problem. When you create a Kalido Gatekeeper it goes to gatekeeper schema and grabs the encrypted username and password for WHSUSR schema from USER_DETAILS table. If you have changed the password of GATEKEEPER schema itself then you can override that by checking the option ‘Force the GateKeeper to connect to the database as a specific user’ and then supplying the schema name and new password. However, even after that, gatekeeper configuration will fail. It fails because of the fact that it grabs the encrypted password for WHSUSR schema from USER_DETAILS table that equals the default password of WHSUSR, goldeneyex.

You would think that it is not a problem. You will use the KSetPass utility and change the password of WHSUSR schema. However, that would not work because for KSetPass utility to work you would need gatekeeper configured first. So now you are into a vicious circle. There are two ways to solve this puzzle. One is by asking Kalido Support to give you encrypted value of WHSUSR password and then update the USER_DETAILS table manually. Another way is by asking your DBA team to change the password of WHSUSR schema to default goldeneyex. Once you have configured your gatekeeper they can change it back to whatever they want and then you can change it accordingly using KSetPass utility.

The key here is to get your Kalido gatekeeper configured first and foremost. Once the gatekeeper is there, you can do pretty much whatever you want.