Problems when installing SOASuite 10.1.3.1.0

I bumped into a problem with the installation of the SOASuite 10.1.3.1.0 today.

The problems arise when the initial run of the Universal Installer choked on the OPMN config assistant. Actually this assistant just stops, reloads and starts the opmn. Big deal - unless your system is slow. The opmnctl will hit a timeout.

So far - so good. Just quit the installer, cleaned up a little bit and tried to rerun the configToolsCommands. The opmn ran without a glitch.

Now the problems started.

There is just one assistant left - the Oracle WebServices Inspection Language CA.
But this crashed immediately with the following errors:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher
  at gnu.gcj.runtime.FirstThread.run() (/usr/lib/libgcj.so.5.0.0)
  at _Jv_ThreadRun(java.lang.Thread) (/usr/lib/libgcj.so.5.0.0)
  at _Jv_RunMain(java.lang.Class, byte const, int, byte const, boolean) (/usr/lib/libgcj.so.5.0.0)
  at __gcj_personality_v0 (/home/oracle/product/soasuite1013/cfgtoollogs/java.version=1.4.2)
  at __libc_start_main (/lib/tls/libc-2.3.4.so)
  at _Jv_RegisterClasses (/home/oracle/product/soasuite1013/cfgtoollogs/java.version=1.4.2)

I thought of the problem I experienced earlier: if there is a /etc/ant.conf on your system ant will fail. Checked - but no ant.conf so the problem must be something else.

After some googling I found out that this problem is usually caused by a JAVA_HOME that is set incorrectly.

Changing the JAVA_HOME to the $ORACLE_HOME/jdk/ the rerun succeeded.
Seems that the Universal Installer sets the JAVA_HOME to the correct location, but the configToolsCommands will not inherit these settings.

I will log an SR with support - let's see what they think about this.

Keep track of your virtual machines

I use VMWare a lot. So I end up with a lot of virtual machines on my 500GB external hard disk (the old one with 250 GB was full).

Normally I gave the VM instances self-descripting names like rh3_as10infra which is fine for me as I know what's on them.

However I'm just preparing an VM instance that will be distributed to other people that need to have an Oracle playground without the hassle of installing it themselves.

So I found out (with some help from a colleague) that in the notes section of the VMWare Server you can just add some valuable information. Have a look at this example:

This will enable those people to get their machines up and running without asking me a lot of questions.