Andreas' Adventures

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.

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.

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.

* (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 setti...

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.

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 i...

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.

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 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.

Haven't blogged this before. A while ago I posted that my Oracle VM was not working and that I shut it down. Shortly after this I found that the reason was the faulty disk I was using. Rebuild Oracle VM and still happy about it.

When patching the Oracle OIM 10.1.4 to OIM 10.1.4.3 the first configuration assistant might fail immediately. Try starting the listener and issue a retry. This helped in my case.

Very often when you are busy with VMWare, you need an extra disk. Now creating the disk can happen while the VM Linux guest is active. However you don't see the disk immediately. A reboot will help obviously, but I found a nice script on http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ that will show the new SCSI device, so that you can continue and add the disk without a reboot. Just search for the rescan-scsi-bus.sh script. It is on my VMWare Server now and will go directly to each new Linux guest from now on. Any possibility to prevent a reboot is welcome ;-)

Hmm, sometimes life is funny. If I say to you that I have a generic patch, you would expect one patch that can be applied to all versions. Not in this case. I need to apply a patch for the Oracle IDM Suite (10.1.4). Finding the patch is already difficult - and then there are four versions of the same patch - apparently based on different versions of the underlying J2EE. In my opinion this is not generic. Trial and error led me to one of the four versions - which then came back with: OPatch detects your platform as 46 while this patch xxxxxxx supports platforms: 0 (Generic Platform) So again - it seems that my definition of generic differs from Oracle's view. I would understand an error, if the patch was for platform 46 or 18 or whatever. But here a generic patch is apparently not applicable for my platform. Luckily Metalink Note 404473.1 offers a solution. So setting the following: export OPATCH_PLATFORM_ID=0 does trick the opatch into believing that it is no Linux machine any l...

Today I decided to abandon Oracle VM and move back to VMWare. A while ago I bought my old 4GB laptop from my company, when I was given a new one. I added a 1TB disk and installed Oracle VM 2.2 on it. There are some quirks with Oracle VM when it comes to support low end systems. First of all the system is memory bound quite fast. See an earlier post of me (http://achatzia.blogspot.com/2010/05/oracle-vm-memory-issue.html) to see how Oracle VM treats it memory. The second main issue is the problem with external USB2.0 devices. I ended up rebooting an image quite often as the SCSI drive was declared dead. I worked with VMWare since about 6 years, and only had lost one image - a colleague disconnected my external drive which resulted in a corrupt Oracle database. With Oracle VM I never had that stability. So for me it is good-bye OVM, and welcome back VMWare Server. Obviously the VMWare Server will run on a Linux host with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 .

I was reinstalling my Oracle VM (again). During the configuration of the Oracle VM Manager template I ran into an error: OVM-2007. The template (new OVM image) could not find the host it was running on. Quick check in the /etc/hosts file of the OVM Server showed: 127.0.0.1 ovm.mydomain.local ovm localhost.localdomain localhost So I changed it to read: 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost 10.1.1.100 ovm.mydomain.local ovm localhost.localdomain localhost To me as a Unix veteran it is still a mistery why somebody came up with the idea to put anything besides 127.0.0.1 localhost into the first line.

Recently I had a lot of disk errors on my Oracle VM server. The errors indicated that some scsi problems were manifesting itself with: unable to enumerate USB device on port 2 After unloading and reloading the ehci_hcd it seems to be gone.

Today I tried to cut some corners and use a silent.xml file for WLS 10.3.3 for a silent installation of 10.3.2. To my amazement on a clean machine I received the following error: oracle@xxx001:/opt/oracle$ java -Djava.io.tmpdir=/opt/oracle/tmp -jar /nfsstage/wls1032_generic.jar -mode=silent -silent_xml=./silent/wls_silent.xml -log=/tmp/wls.log Extracting 0%....................................................................................................100% The local BEA product registry is corrupted. Please select another Middleware Home or contact Oracle Support I checked the wls_silent.xml file and found that it includes Coherence, which was not bundled with the 10.3.2 version. So I modified the 10.3.3 silent_xml file from value="WebLogic Server/Core Application Server|WebLogic Server/Administration Console|WebLogic Server/Configuration Wizard and Upgrade Framework|WebLogic Server/Web 2.0 HTTP Pub-Sub Server|WebLogic Server/WebLogic JDBC Drivers|WebLogic Server/Third ...