Disabling of Password Expiration in Oracle Apex(Internal Workspace Admin)

This post was inspired by a question on the OTN APEX forum, which contains how to 

1. reset set the password of the Oracle Internal Workspace Admin   and 
2. Set the account never to expire 

The first bullet has so many blogs  talk about how to reset the password of the Internal Workspace.

However, i am more intrigued with the second .

To start of with It is not advisable to never expire accounts since its rudimental for user to always renew their accounts  prior to expiration. The default expiration of an account is mostly 180 days so hey whats the point going to do this again after 180 days?? .

There are two methods that can be used to achieve this 

• Generic Never expiration of all User accounts (This should never be practiced in a production Environment

All database users are assigned to something called a PROFILE.
The profile controls two aspects of the users database access – the system resources available to the user and the rules around the user’s password.
There are two created by default when you install oracle install, however all users are assigned to the default profile which is called, appropriately enough, DEFAULT.
You can find details of any profile in the DBA_PROFILES view.
Let’s have a look at the settings for the password properties in the DEFAULT profile

1 2 3 4

SELECT resource_name, limit FROM dba_profiles WHERE profile = 'DEFAULT' AND resource_type = 'PASSWORD';

The results should be something like :

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

RESOURCE_NAME                       LIMIT --------------------------------    ---------------------------------------- FAILED_LOGIN_ATTEMPTS                            10 PASSWORD_LIFE_TIME                      180 PASSWORD_REUSE_TIME                     UNLIMITED PASSWORD_REUSE_MAX                      UNLIMITED PASSWORD_VERIFY_FUNCTION                        NULL PASSWORD_LOCK_TIME                       1 PASSWORD_GRACE_TIME                      7

In order to prevent the pain of password resets, we just need to change the PASSWORD_LIFE_TIME…

1 2	ALTER PROFILE DEFAULT LIMIT PASSWORD_LIFE_TIME UNLIMITED /

That’s all there is to it. You no longer need to change any database account passwords…unless you want to.

This post was inspired by a question on the OTN APEX forum, which contains how to 

1. reset set the password of the Oracle Internal Workspace Admin   and 
2. Set the account never to expire 

The first bullet has so many blogs  talk about how to reset the password of the Internal Workspace.

However, i am more intrigued with the second .

To start of with It is not advisable to never expire accounts since its rudimental for user to always renew their accounts  prior to expiration. The default expiration of an account is mostly 180 days so hey whats the point going to do this again after 180 days?? .

There are two methods that can be used to achieve this 

• In Oracle Apex 

With APEX, things are a little different.
The admin user’s password can be set via the apxchpwd.sql. However, changes made to the password rules in APEX itself do not appear to be picked up in this script.

First off, we need to logon as the apex admin….

Point your browser at http://localhost:8080/apex

In the logon screen specify :

Workspace : Internal
Username : admin
Password : the admin password

NOTE – if you don’t know ( or have forgotten) your admin password, you can use the aforementioned apxchpwd.sql script to change it.
On the default install, the script can be found at :

1	$ORACLE_HOME/database_name/apex/apxchpwd.sql

If you’ve upgraded to a later version of APEX since installing the DB then you’ll need to use the version of this script that is with the code for the new APEX version.

In the Manage Instance dropdown menu, select …Manage Password Complexity

Go to the Workspace Login Control Section.
Here, we can do – more-or-less the equivalent of what we’ve just done on the database – i.e. set the password not to expire.
I say more-or-less, because the setting we need to change will only accept a positive non-zero integer value up to 99999.

Set :
Require User Account Expiration and Locking to No
Account Password Lifetime (days) : 99999

If you want to turn off the password complexity, then go to the next section – Workspace Password Policy and amend the settings as shown below

Finally, if you want to lift these restrictions for the Admin User as well…

Go to the Service Administration Password Policy section of the page and select :
Use policy specified in Workspace Password Policy…

Click Apply Changes.

If you want to now change the Admin password free of the default restrictions, you need to do this from within the tool itself :

Select Manage Workspaces from the menu bar and choose Manage Developers and Users

This will give you a list of all the users setup in Apex.

Look for the ADMIN user for the INTERNAL workspace.
Click on the Pencil Button

Type in the new password in the password field
Set Require Change of Password on First Use to No
and click Apply Changes

Hope this help in a good way .

Benjamin