OK - I exaggerated a little bit in the title - but as you may have noticed - it is VERY cold in central Europe. Now this guy here loves the sun. I admit I love the SUN products as well, but normally I refer to the big yellow thing in the sky.
Leaving the Netherlands for a long weekend with my wife to travel to Malaga is nice. But to feel the Spanish winter sun with 16 C (+ that is) instead of the Dutch version of it (-10) gave me the feeling that coming to Malaga for the SOA Community Forum is a kind of a life saver. So yes - I combined business with pleasure, but sometimes you just have to.
In addition to that - staying abreast of things that go on in the community, in the SOA Suite arena in general and meeting a couple of old friends (and hopefully making some new ones along the line) is a thing that can be compared to a life saver. Although in a project an error does not automatically mean that blood flows through the streets, having a good knowledge of the products you work with is very helpful.
So I hope that you will envy me to type this in the afternoon sun, enjoying tapas and meet some folks tonight in Malaga, instead of freezing, eating snert (look it up on Wikipedia).
Come to an Oracle Fusion Middleware Community as well - it might save your life ;-)
Monday, February 06, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Use RDA or Enterprise Manager for Governance
Within my current project I ended up in an interesting discussion. As part of the governance or more specifically some government regulations for the systems security we needed a description of the system components.
Obviously there are several layers for this topic, but in order to have a complete view of the system a list of installed system components and also of the systems configuration was desired.
Well, as you can guess, there was no tangible description of the current configuration, and there was also only a sketchy overview of the Oracle components which were used to build the system.
So, the first idea was to ask the various departments which were involved in the setup and configuration of the system to use a variety of tools and approaches to deliver the information.
I offered the idea to use "the one ring to rule them all" approach. Oracle offers two tools that provide an overview of the used components, their configuration and even of platform settings.
One tool would be either the local Enterprise Manager or the central Grid Control (Cloud Control if you are up to date). The problem is that from the Enterprise Manager perspective, each of the layers (host, OS, storage, Oracle components, configuration) would need its own report. So a number of reports would need to be executed.
So my thought turned to the Remote Diagnostic Assistant. The RDA is a tool that is used by Oracle Support to gather information of the system setup, OS settings, and the like.
So I downloaded RDA for one of the machines, unpacked it, configured it and executed it.
Within minutes you'll have the output of a large number of Perl scripts.
The good thing is that the presentation is provided in a human readable format (HTML) so that a support analyst or the DBA can have a glance at the data.
But even more interesting is the fact that each HTML page is also available as a text file, with a nice structure.
So with the intention of building a prototype, I used some AWK scripts to get the data out of the text files, and used it as input for the data pump.
Create some tables in a new tablespace, get the data into it and you have a description of your technical components for your governance.
Next step would be to add the date of the execution, and you could easily figure out if changes had happened in the last period and add them to your governance.
So again a nice use of things you already have in your environment which can be put to good use for slightly different purposes as they were intended in the first place.
Obviously there are several layers for this topic, but in order to have a complete view of the system a list of installed system components and also of the systems configuration was desired.
Well, as you can guess, there was no tangible description of the current configuration, and there was also only a sketchy overview of the Oracle components which were used to build the system.
So, the first idea was to ask the various departments which were involved in the setup and configuration of the system to use a variety of tools and approaches to deliver the information.
I offered the idea to use "the one ring to rule them all" approach. Oracle offers two tools that provide an overview of the used components, their configuration and even of platform settings.
One tool would be either the local Enterprise Manager or the central Grid Control (Cloud Control if you are up to date). The problem is that from the Enterprise Manager perspective, each of the layers (host, OS, storage, Oracle components, configuration) would need its own report. So a number of reports would need to be executed.
So my thought turned to the Remote Diagnostic Assistant. The RDA is a tool that is used by Oracle Support to gather information of the system setup, OS settings, and the like.
So I downloaded RDA for one of the machines, unpacked it, configured it and executed it.
Within minutes you'll have the output of a large number of Perl scripts.
The good thing is that the presentation is provided in a human readable format (HTML) so that a support analyst or the DBA can have a glance at the data.
But even more interesting is the fact that each HTML page is also available as a text file, with a nice structure.
So with the intention of building a prototype, I used some AWK scripts to get the data out of the text files, and used it as input for the data pump.
Create some tables in a new tablespace, get the data into it and you have a description of your technical components for your governance.
Next step would be to add the date of the execution, and you could easily figure out if changes had happened in the last period and add them to your governance.
So again a nice use of things you already have in your environment which can be put to good use for slightly different purposes as they were intended in the first place.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Learn it from the horses mouth
Early February you should convince your boss (and yourself) to come to Malaga in Spain from 07-FEB-2012 to 08-FEB-2012 or even until 10-FEB-2012 to attend the first combined Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forum for the SOA Suite, WebCenter, BPM and WebLogic Partner Communities.
Let me give you a number of reasons why you should be there:
Let me know if you are coming so we can plan ahead for some time to grab a beer - cu in Malaga
Let me give you a number of reasons why you should be there:
- A number of senior Oracle PM's will be there to share the newest developments in these different themes
- Meet the creme-de-la-creme of the Oracle Communities
- See me presenting
- See presentations of others who are even more exiting then I am ;-)
- Give your network to the Oracle communities a boost
- Enjoy the city and social event
- Participate in excellent trainings
Let me know if you are coming so we can plan ahead for some time to grab a beer - cu in Malaga
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Celebration party for an award
When you win you need to celebrate. This was the line of thinking when I found out that I was part of a group that won the Oracle SOA Community Country Award.
Well - thinking about a party is one thing, preparing it and finally having the small party is something completely different. It starts with finding a date that would be suitable for the majority of invited people. As you can imagine the SOA ACE's and ACE Directors have a busy life, that takes them places. Alongside that they are engaged with customers who want to squeeze every bit of knowledge out of them. So everybody is pretty busy (that's what makes you an ACE).
After some deliberation (and checks of international Oracle events, Trip-it, blogs and tweets) a date was chosen.
Meeting on a Friday evening for some drinks is probably not a Dutch-only activity. But as some of the ACE's are self-employed they miss the companies around them to organize such events. Come the day a turn-out of almost 50% was great - although I expected some more folks :-( . This was mainly due to some illness and work overload.
Luckily the mini-party got going, (alcoholic) beverages were consumed, food was appreciated, a decent picture was made (see below) and all had a good chat and hopefully a good time.
(Above from left to right: Eric Elzinga, Andreas Chatziantoniou, Mike van Aalst, Edwin Biemond)
The only minor disappointment of the day was that the organizer of the SOA Community was not capable of joining. Neither directly nor via a Skype video feed. Apparently there were some adverse weather conditions near his home office that required his attention - and the use of a kite ;-)
Jürgen - with you we would have had even more fun.
All in all a nice evening and certainly a "meeting" which can be repeated.
Well - thinking about a party is one thing, preparing it and finally having the small party is something completely different. It starts with finding a date that would be suitable for the majority of invited people. As you can imagine the SOA ACE's and ACE Directors have a busy life, that takes them places. Alongside that they are engaged with customers who want to squeeze every bit of knowledge out of them. So everybody is pretty busy (that's what makes you an ACE).
After some deliberation (and checks of international Oracle events, Trip-it, blogs and tweets) a date was chosen.
Meeting on a Friday evening for some drinks is probably not a Dutch-only activity. But as some of the ACE's are self-employed they miss the companies around them to organize such events. Come the day a turn-out of almost 50% was great - although I expected some more folks :-( . This was mainly due to some illness and work overload.
Luckily the mini-party got going, (alcoholic) beverages were consumed, food was appreciated, a decent picture was made (see below) and all had a good chat and hopefully a good time.
(Above from left to right: Eric Elzinga, Andreas Chatziantoniou, Mike van Aalst, Edwin Biemond)
The only minor disappointment of the day was that the organizer of the SOA Community was not capable of joining. Neither directly nor via a Skype video feed. Apparently there were some adverse weather conditions near his home office that required his attention - and the use of a kite ;-)
Jürgen - with you we would have had even more fun.
All in all a nice evening and certainly a "meeting" which can be repeated.
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
Quirk in the IDM 11 installation
OID root.sh seems to have an error in IDM 11.1.1.x ; root.sh does not set the setuid for the OID procs.
You need to change them with:
chmod 4750 oidldapd
chmod 4700 oidmon
chmod 4700 oidrepld
and retry the configuration afterwards.
The strange thing though is that the installer than proceeds with using ports 3060 and 3061.
Restart - and as the permissions are ok now - it will work.
Friday, September 16, 2011
x86_64 startup issues with Oracle 11.2
I started running an Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.6 with an Oracle 11.2 database.
When I started the dbca I was hit by this error:
Any ORA-27xxx error looks scary to me but they all seem to boil down to issues with the kernel's semaphore settings.
So I opened the sysctl.conf file and to my astonishment found the following:
I changed the kernel.sem line to something more useful with 4 parameters. Running sysctl -p and a restart solved the problem.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Installation of Oracle Enterprise Repository on OEL
I am in the process of installing the Oracle Enterprise Repository in an Oracle Enterprise Linux environment (actually on a VirtualBox).
One of the post-installation steps is to install and enable the Java Web Start. As the documentation is a little bit murky I researched and found the following site with excellent information: http://stuffivelearned.org/doku.php?id=apps:firefox:jnlpfix
Had to use it as the Firefox installation in the OEL is pretty basic.
One of the post-installation steps is to install and enable the Java Web Start. As the documentation is a little bit murky I researched and found the following site with excellent information: http://stuffivelearned.org/doku.php?id=apps:firefox:jnlpfix
Had to use it as the Firefox installation in the OEL is pretty basic.
Tiny quirk in VirtualBox (kind of)
I started up my VirtualBox this morning and was amazed that it told me that the DVD ISO image I have still mounted was no longer accessible.
So what has happened since last night? Well - I charged my iPod on my laptop before I hooked up my external USB drive which contains the ISO image. Apparently Windows changed the order of the drive letters (was E: is F: now).
So after all it seems that VirtualBox has not so much a quirk as it connot do anything better that accept what Windows will feed into it.
So what has happened since last night? Well - I charged my iPod on my laptop before I hooked up my external USB drive which contains the ISO image. Apparently Windows changed the order of the drive letters (was E: is F: now).
So after all it seems that VirtualBox has not so much a quirk as it connot do anything better that accept what Windows will feed into it.
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