Andreas' Adventures

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.

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.

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 t...

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.