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:

• 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

More info and how to register can be found here: http://www.oracle.com/partners/secure/news/oracle-events/1400537

Let me know if you are coming so we can plan ahead for some time to grab a beer - cu in Malaga

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oracle VirtualBox - first (short) impressions

I am using Oracle VirtualBox now since a couple of weeks in order to establish if it can replace my VMWare Server.

I want to put down a couple of quick impressions - which will hopefully be followed up by some more insight.

Speed:
It seems that Oracle VirtualBox is faster than the VMWare Server. Creating an image as well as starting it up and shutting it down are pretty fast. However if your machine is pushing the limits on memory the shutdown process of an image can easily take 5 minutes.

FAT/NTFS:
I have not yet found the possibility to create a disk file in chunks of 2GB. VMWare offered this OOTB. Now when I move my image from my Windows7 NTFS filesystem to the FAT external disk it complains about a 20GB file. More research is needed here.

Distributing images:
I copied the images and gave them to some colleagues during several trainings. My experience is that the different laptops we use are not handled well by VirtualBox. E.g. I had to remove a network from the vbox-file in order to just start an image on a different laptop.

Stay tuned for more.

WebCenter Spaces startup problems

For a training I installed a WebCenter Suite environment on an Oracle Enterprise Linux.

I ran into two problems. First I couldn't start the AdminServer. The logfile told me that the JDBC to mdsSpaces failed due to a Socket time out. Took me some time to realize this, but the reason was that I had configured the VirtualBox with a DNS (on the Windows host). Therefore the JDBC calls went out to seek for the database - which timed out.

The second issue I had (and still have) is that after starting the NodeManager and AdminServer I couldn't start the WC_Spaces Server from inside the WebLogic Console. I have no solution for this yet, only a work-around. When I start the WC_Spaces from the commandline as a Managed Server it works.

If somebody has an idea why this happens, obviously I'd like to hear from you.

Eine Woche voller Samstage *

* (stolen title from a German children book - a week full of Saturdays)

This week was different than other weeks. I spend one day working from home (well, almost - as I had to travel to the office to get my laptop re-staged) and also at two Oracle Community meetings. Although this was work (with some great fun-activities as well) this felt like an extraordinary week. Read the book if you want to get the feeling.

The first community meeting (SOA and E2.0) was in my own town Utrecht, which was off course very convenient. I met a lot of people from all over Europe and had the chance to exchange ideas about SOA and learned that BPM will be the next big thing. WebCenter will also evolve into something even bigger than it is now, due to the advance of Fusion Apps.

The best thing however was the Q&A session with David Shaffer of Oracle. Oracle shows a lot of interest in the activities and concerns of partners.

After that I went to Paris to attend the Security Community meeting. Same setting as above. Met again a lot of people I knew and a lot of people who I will be in contact with in the near future. Again excellent presentations of Oracle and another key take away message - everything in Fusion Apps will be based on 11g IDM and Security products.

Obviously both events had also a social get together. Tasting beer in Utrecht was great (probably because I was on my bicycle and could drink more than one beer ;-) and the cruise on the Seine in Paris was spectacular.

I encourage everybody to join the partner communities - as this will give you the feeling of inclusion and will widen your network tremendously.

oracle.as.config.ProvisionException

Ran into a problem when installing Oracle Identity Management into a WLS 11g. Registering the OID with opmnctl gave me an oracle.as.config.ProvisionException.

Solved it by extending the domain (although the configuration of the OID was specifically set to No Domain). Make sure that the Enterprise Manager is in the domain.
After that (and this is the important part) make sure to restart the domain, at least the AdminServer.

Several Node Managers in Oracle WebLogic on one machine

This is an age old dilemma for people like me. You work in a project, that has several environments (DEV, TEST, QA, PRD). Typically as a project member you are not allowed access to QA and PRD - which is very good. The main problem is that the QA and PRD environments offer high availability.

In order to provide a good installation manual you need to come up with clustering even when you do not have enough machines.

So for my current project I have chosen a different approach.
I have four blades, three with 1 CPU (dual core) and one with 2 CPU's (dual core as well).

I use one for the database, one for the middle tier (the bigger one), one for the web tier, and the fourth one for the load balancer and firewall.

The load balancer and firewall will be done with iptables and HAProxy.

Now on the middle tier I needed to have 14 different nodes.
I created virtual NIC's and put them into the hosts file as well.

In order to have "independent" WebLogic Servers I installed them in different WLS_HOME directories. Now I want a Node manager, an Admin Server and at least one Managed Server per NIC. This proved a little bit more difficult than expected.

Changing the Node Manager to run on a different port is one activity that takes three steps already. As all my Managed Servers will run on SSL as well I ran into a problem with the BEA-090482. Solving this meant to recreate the Java Keystore for the virtual NIC hostname. After this I was capable of starting everything independently.

I will try to put everything as a document tonight and place it on my website.

WLS installer - Uncheck security updates

I intended to install some WLS homes on Friday. Somehow, when I unchecked the "I want to receive security updates via My Oracle Support" I ended up with a grayed out dialog box.

This wandered around my head the whole weekend. I retried this morning and found a solution.
Please check out the document on http://www.foxglove-it.nl/html/documents.html (easier for me to put documents there, instead of blogspot.

Ubuntu Gnome quirk - d minimizes Window

Reinstalled one of my laptops with Ubuntu Server 10.10 and put Gnome on it as well.
While I was accessing the Gnome Desktop with VNC I experienced some strange behavior. Entering the letter 'd' minimized the Window. A little bit of research showed that this can be solved by changing the following setting:
System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts
Scroll down to "Hide all normal Windows and set focus to the desktop"
In there the letter 'D' should be present. Set this to disable and enjoy Gnome as it was meant to be.

Tron - Legacy

Tron was one of the two movies that gave me the push to study computer science. Now - some 30 years later Tron - Legacy hit the movies, off course with better graphics, 3D effects, and a somewhat better story.

During the movie I looked back at the time since the first part.

Man - WHAT A RIDE!

I'm still the young lad (OK - with a fatter belly and the first gray hairs) and I am still enjoying every minute of it.

This shows that if you do something with passion and conviction - every day is a good one.