Why OEM drives me crazy sometimes

OEM just seems to have too many brittle esoteric configuration files and process dependencies. Ideally I just want to connect with system/password and go. Is that too simple to ask for?

Today I tried out OEM and got the general broken page:

And my first reaction was just to give up and move on, but then I noticed the error message sounded some what simple:

ORA-28001: the password has expired (DBD ERROR: OCISessionBegin)

Hmm, maybe this *is* easily fixable. Well guess again. Luckily someone has well documented the fix

http://dbtricks.com/?p=34

After the “fix” EM still wouldn’t work because DBSNMP’s password had expired as well, but at least it gave a password screen to change the password. So to simply launch OEM  to get to the performance page after my system password had expired I had to change the passwords for not one but 3 users:  SYSTEM, SYSMAN and DBSMP which is crazy enough, but the worst part is that SYSMAN’s password is hardcoded, though encrypted,in a flat file that has to found (good luck) and edited.

PS, to turn off password expiration which is on by default in 11 but was off by default in 10:

alter profile default limit password_life_time unlimited;