Nomanoma,
I'm glad that you confirmed that you have root privileges for your environment, because going in "the back door" requires elevated privileges.
I'll focus on how to accomplish your objective from the Solaris perspective:
[tt]
1) Confirm the existing Unix group that Oracle recognises as the DBA-privileged group name:
a) cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib/
b) cat config.s
i) observe the lines at/near the end of that file that contain the designators, ".ascii"; the group name that follows immediately that designator is the name of the Oracle-DBA-privileged Unix group.
2) Connect to the subject machine as a Unix user that is a member of the Oracle-DBA-privileged Unix group.
3) Confirm that the environment-variable settings are correct for these variables:
a) ORACLE_HOME -- the fully qualified path to the directory tree that contains your Oracle installation...probably "/home/oracle/8.1.6"
b) ORACLE_SID -- contains the "name" of the Oracle database instance to which you are trying to connect.
4) Connect, as a DBA to the Oracle instance:
a) Run Oracle's SQL*Plus program as a DBA:
i) % sqlplus /nolog
ii) SQL> connect / as sysdba
iii) alter user <username> identified by <new password>;[/tt]
Let us know if this resolves your need.
![[santa] [santa] [santa]](/data/assets/smilies/santa.gif)
Mufasa
(aka Dave of Sandy, Utah, USA)
[I provide low-cost, remote Database Administration services:
www.dasages.com]