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.
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maybe someone has attempted to login with you username on otn? being this on web anyone who knows you username can cause locking of your account … this seem not good
Could be. The SSO logins now are just simple emails. Getting your email address is often a no-brainer. Thus, make sure your password is strong. :)
Wow! It seems someone at Oracle needs a refresher on security basics. Let’s see: denial-of-service vulnerability (your “adversary” could keep your account locked forever); sending passwords (not one-time tokens) via email… Don’t tell me they also store the passwords (as opposed to hashes thereof).
I’d expect more professionalism from Oracle…
Well, I know for a fact that the group responsible for oracle.com and product development teams have nothing in common really.
However, I’m really surprised how much slack they can afford, indeed.
I had the same problem several days in a row around the same time you wrote about it. Password reset was the answer. Too bad they don’t have a button that gets rid of all that flash.