ORA-01017: invalid username/password - While Starting Instance using srvctl

If you face ORA-01017, following could be the reasons of this error.

• Username has been specified wrongly – check the username.
• Password has been specified wrongly – check the password.
• If you see this error while logging in as user SYS, check if password file exists. If not, re-create the password file or enable OS authentication.
• If you are using srvctl to start an instance/database in a RAC or non-RAC environment, and you face ORA-01017, it would mean that OS authentication is not properly set in your environment. Once I faced this message on my Linux based 11.2.0.4 RAC and the reason of this error was: because parameter SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES was set to NTS (even value “NTS” is wrong for Linux environment) in the SQLNET.ORA file of GRID home. I removed this parameter and then restarting of CRS resolved this issue. If this parameter has a value of “none” you may face same issue. So, just remove this parameter and restart CRS