FYI, i’ve just “invented” a completley new way of increasing capacity of orapwd files online that does not require knowing the SYS password (this is required once you hit ORA-1996, after trying to grant addiitonal SYSDBA). As you probably know there is hard limit of entries set when creating new orapw
[oracle@t10050 dbs]$ cp orapwdtest4 orapwdtest4.old # make backup [oracle@t10050 dbs]$ ls -l orapwdtes4 # save the filesize in bytes as SIZE1 [oracle@t10050 dbs]$ orapwd file=/tmp/remove entries=20 Enter password for SYS: anything [oracle@t10050 dbs]$ ls -l /tmp/remove # file size will be approx 3584 bytes on Linux x86_64, if you compare it to the default orapwd , you will realize it is bigger by 2048 bytes [oracle@t10050 dbs]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/empty.2k bs=1k count=2 [oracle@t10050 dbs]$ cat /tmp/empty.2k >> orapwdtest4
Done! Brief tests shows that it works and you can add more working SYSDBA accounts, removal works ok, but again DO NOT TRY IT ON PRODUCTION as the internal orapwd structure is unknown to me 