Copying files to a VMWare Server

I am using VMWare a lot for my Oracle activites. To be specific I use the VMWare Server. Now one of the missing features of the VMWare Server is that the drag and drop of files does not work.
Typically with a Linux I use WinSCP from my Windows Vista host. With a Windows guest I often use the feature of the Remote Desktop to connect my local drive.
Another possibility exists, although it is a little awkward and almost cumbersome if you need to transport a lot of files.
In the VMWare Server a utility exists which will copy a file into the guest OS. This utility is called vmrun and it works as follows.
Go to the directory where the file that you want to copy is located. Then execute the vmrun command with the following switches:
-T server
-h https://yourVMWareServerName:port/sdk (typically the port is 8333)
-u username_of_the_vmware_server
-p password_of_the_vmware_server
-gu username_of_the_vmware_guest
-gp password_of_the_vmware_guest
copyFileFromHostToGuest
“VMWare Configuration File”
source_file_name target_file_name
In the following screenshot you can see this command in action.



If you don’t know the VMWare configuration file location go to the summary page of the VMWare image and click on the “Configure VM”. This will bring up the following dialog box. The VMWare configuration file location is in the second part of the dialog box.

Fun at OOW 2009

Although Oracle Open World is behind us I still need to put some content about this on the site.

Let me start with the fun part - the Oracle ACE Dinner.

Here is a picture of Lillian Buziak, Steven Feuerstein and me at the ACE Dinner:


I had a lot of fun but found out too late that the barkeepers were putting alcohol in the cocktails :#)

OOW2009 is over

It is Friday, the OOW 2009 is over and as almost everybody I feel that it was a good conference, but also am happy that it is over.
The event is of course perfect for networking and learning. But you have very long days and need to be careful that all the parties will not leave you drunk all the time.

I will post my sessions as soon as possible on the net - especially the Lego presentation had some good feedback and was very funny.

And I have to say that staying in a house in San Francisco (thank you Anjo) made this trip very worthwhile. Sitting in the hot tub after a long day is very very cool.

Meet a real author ;-)

While wandering around at Moscone, I bounced into Ronald Rood. Ronald and I had worked together and we had a very good time back then. Apparently without me he has too much spare time so he found the time to write a book on the Oracle Scheduler (http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Oracle-Scheduler-11g-Databases/dp/1847195989) .

Tuesday he will be at Moscone signing his book.

Meanwhile I have bought another book - on SOA Suite 11gR1. With the current exchange rate of the dollar and an extra 20% discount this was a steal.

Hmmmm, maybe I should write a book myself and become famous.

OOW is in full swing now

Sunday 08:30 - and the fun starts!!!

It is always a tremendous feeling to be at OOW. So many colleagues and people genuinely interested in Oracle.

I'm taking my morning fix first with Alex Gorbachev on RAC Workload Management and then I will head from Moscone to the Hilton to see a session on Oracle Service Bus 11g Deep Dive.

Stay tuned for more.

I will be presenting at Oracle Open World 2009

After the Oracle Mix voting process was finished two of my five presentations were selected to be presented.

I am looking forward to present:

The great ESB - OSB - BPEL cook-off

and

Combining the two coolest things on the world Weblogic and Lego Mindstorms

See you all at the Oracle Open World in SF ;-)

Using Grid Control to monitor the performance of web services

I have written a short how-to document that demonstrates the usage of Grid Control to monitor the performance of web services.

Check it out on:

http://www.foxglove-it.nl/documents/MonitorWebServicesinGridControl.pdf

Spending day and night at the Oracle office

I had two sessions at Oracle Netherlands yesterday in the evening and today the whole day.

Yesterday Rob Zoeteweij gave a presentation about the Provisioning within Grid Control.
Today was the technical briefing of the Oracle Partners about FMW11g.

Both events gave me a pile of new ideas - both business wise as well as technical.
So I guess I will spend a part of the upcoming weekend with another deep-dive of the new FMW11g products and also prepare some input for my management on "How to make money with FMW11g".

I expect that I will take my laptop with me on my vacation - which is just a week away. I only need to find a way to smuggle this machine into my car without my wife finding this out :-)

The funny thing of being in the same place (Oracle office) twice was that I started to look for my car this afternoon where I had put it yesterday in the evening. I guess I need a little bit of vacation anyway.

Test run of OFMW11g

I am sitting in my garden, enjoying the good weather (26 C/79 F) and build a new Virtual Machine in order to install the new Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.
For me this is a perfect afternoon ;-)

Fusion Middleware documentation

If you go to
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12839_01/index.htm
you will see the following:


So with the new version of the software a new look and feel of the documentation is available.
It takes a minute to find your way around, but it looks a little bit better than the old tabbed version of the documentation.

Fusion Middleware is released

Yesterday the new version of Fusion Middleware was released. Thomas Kurian and a group of senior Oracle people talked about the new version, showed some demos and included customers for some testimonials.

The software is already available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/middleware/htdocs/111110_fmw.html

I have downloaded almost everything already and will start to install this piece by piece on my machine. I am particularly interested in the IDM Analytics and the new features of the Web Center Suite. Also the integration of the Oracle Service Bus with BPEL and their management inside the Enterprise Manager seem to be more than worthwhile to investigate.

Vote for my presentations at Oracle Open World 2009

Could you do me a favor and vote for my sessions for the Oracle Open World 2009? Go to these URL's (short registration) and click on vote:

https://mix.oracle.com/oow/proposals/10412-combining-the-two-coolest-things-on-the-world-weblogic-and-lego-mindstorms

https://mix.oracle.com/oow/proposals/10471-the-big-esb-osb-bpel-cook-off

Thanks in advance!

cu
Andreas

Different servers in Content Server

I'm taking some steps to work on my ECM 2.0 skills.
One of the things to do was the tutorial which comes with the software.
At a certain point you are asked to use the "Administration Server".
Clicking on it revealed the following text:

Unable to retrieve root IdcAdmin page. Permission denied. Address '127.0.0.1' is not an allowable remote socket address.

Ok, I'm using VMWare and did this from the Windows host, while the Content Server runs on one of my Linux machines. I tried with a browser inside the VMWare itself.
Same result.

Searching the OTN forums I found a part of the solution. The posts say that you need to add the IP address of the machine to the config.cfg file. Then the apache.cfg file needs to be changed ("Allow from any" becomes "Allow from all"). The final step is the restart of the server.

Well - it took me a while to find out why it didn't work.
The content server has (at least) two servers:

• one in $UCM_HOME/etc
• and one in $UCM_HOME/admin/etc

My first attempts where in the first directory but never delivered the result I needed. After restarting the server in the $UCM_HOME/admin/etc I finally succeeded.

Are You The Smartest 2009

Oracle has a competition which is called "Are You The Smartest". This is for Oracle partners only. After five sessions with four multiple choice tests the results came in last week.

I won for Accenture.



Apparently I was the only one who prolongated his title from the 2008 competition. So I will be on a trip to see Oracle's HQ in Redwood Shores, enjoy Las Vegas and fly with a helicopter to the Grand Canyon.

Before you all think I'm bragging I need to tell you that I did not expect it, and the two runner ups were just trailing one and two points. So the competitors were very good and I will need to do my best to beat them again next year.

However the best is of course that I have again learned some things which I did not know before. This is the BEST PRICE EVER!

OOW2009

I found this on the Oracle OOW2009 blog: http://blogs.oracle.com/oracleopenworld/2009/05/come_fly_with_me.html#

I hope that the possibility to fly with Sean Tucker also applies to presenters - who register in a different way than the normal conference attendee.

BTW: I just showed the YouTube movie of Sean Tucker to my wife. She just said: "All Oracle people are crazy!". I just replied: "Yes - they are! And this is a good thing ;-) ".

Deleting a Weblogic domain

As I am setting my first baby steps into the world of Weblogic I have to deal with things that might seem very easy for the experienced Weblogic gurus out there, but nevertheless I put my ranting on this blog.

When you are faced with an issue in your Weblogic domain, there is apparently no tool to delete this domain.

The only solution seems to be to remove the directory in which you have created this domain.

Concatenation LDIF lines

When I was extracting some information from an OID I found that the LDIF lines contain a line break. Some searches on the Internet delivered a nice solution from Dan Norris:

http://www.dannorris.com/2008/09/08/concatenating-lines-in-ldapsearch-results/

Using that the the ldif file was modified and was reusable for my purpose (creating provisioning profiles for DIP).

How to crash a Linux system

Sometimes you just need a system to be gone immediately. And with immediately I mean NOW. The moment I do something it should be gone.

This comes in quite handy when you work in an environment that offers High Availability, such as an Oracle RAC, and you need to test a failover or a node crash. The same applies to a middle tier that runs the Oracle Application Server on multiple machines.

Well, if you want to do this you can use these handy commands:

[root@mymachine] cd /proc
[root@mymachine] echo c > sysrq-trigger

Of course you must be root to write into that file. And be aware, you must have (physical) access to the machine as you really need to boot it again. This can be done by pressing the button, or if you use virtualization or any ILO-tool by the available interface.