 Sybase Tips & Tricks by Rob Verschoor | |||
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A blank password
(a.k.a. a 'null' password) only exists in ASE for the
sa login when a new server is created. Officially, you
cannot set a password for an ASE login to blanks
yourself. Unfortunately, you sometimes really need this
possibility anyway. Consider the following situation: you've left the sa password blank for a long time, but now you finally changed it to some normal value (as is indeed recommended). Next day, some important applications don't work anymore because they are using a hard-coded, blank sa password. Now you need to set the sa password back to blanks, but there is no way to do this... This would indeed be a good reason for panic, had there not been a stored procedure called sp_blank_password which sets the sa password back to blanks. In fact, it can set the password of *any* login to blanks. A more detailed discussion of this issue can be found in the article "How to set ASE login passwords (back) to blank", which was published in the Q2 1999 issue of the ISUG Technical Journal . The full article is also available here . A PDF version of the original publication can also be downloaded from here . 
Note: in June 2000, additional information was added to this article about new ASE 12.0 features which allow a blank password to be set in an alternative way. Download/installation instructions
isql -Usa -P<sa-password> -S<servername>
-i sp_blank_password.sql
exec sp_addlogin mytestlogin, verysecret
exec sp_blank_password mytestlogin
isql -Umytestlogin -P -S<servername>
For further background information and instructions for use, see the header of the downloaded file. |
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