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Good old Days
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Normally, you will find here something about Oracle Application Server, but today I discover the "Good old Days" again with Oracle 4.1 on MS-DOS 
The startup was really simple, just type the command ORACLE
and after this startup your instance with the IOR utility
Look at the SGA Size: 16K 
nothing with MB or GB.
Instead of SQLPlus, we got the UFI (User Friendly Interface).
Even on Oracle 4.1 user scott was existing.
And an excellent help was available
I love this old stuff . . .
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Oracle AS Expert Camp Day 2
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At the second day the attendants were split into groups. One group got the task to build up an Oracle AS Identity Management including an Oracle AS WebCenter Suite environment and the second group had to build up an Oracle AS Forms & Reports environment including Load Balancing concept.
Unfortunally we had to change our course room on this morning, so we had to build up once again our highclass network:
Look how enthused my collegues are working:
I was really impressed, that some attendants started the work at 7 o'clock in the morning 
and the last one stopped at midnight
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Oracle AS Expert Camp Day 1
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Today I started an Oracle Application Server Expert Camp with 8 collegues. In the next 5 days I'll teach my collegues a little about the internals and secrets of the Oracle AS. Everyday I'll update my Blog with some highlights and pictures of the Workshop.
Here are some impressions from the first day:
Our highclass network Build up from ourself (Notice to our Helpdesk: Next time we will call you)
The first part of this workshop was a coaching about Linux/Unix held by my collegue Daniel Steiner (thanks for your cooperation).
After the Linux Coaching my collegues got some exercises for concepts of Oracle AS Forms & Reports environment including High Availability Options and Identity Management concepts for Enterprise User Security and tnsnames resolution. The target was to provide me a basic concept until tomorrow (tuesday, 11 o'clock, let's see if they are finish until tomorrow ).
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OpenWorld 2007 Presentation about Oracle AS 11g
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Today I found a cool presentation about the future of Oracle AS 11g from John Lang (Group Manager, Fusion Middleware Product Management).
There will be a complete break of technology, structure, concept and administration of the Oracle AS. Some highlights are:
- Separation of binaries and configuration files
- Several command line interface (CLI) will be merged into one CLI called asctl
- J2EE 1.5 Standard
- One Software installation ($ORACLE_HOME) can contain multiple Oracle AS Instances, this means if you need another Oracle AS Instance on a server where is already an Oracle AS installed, you just have to execute a command through the new CLI asctl
- Unified Management through JMX MBean
- New web based Administration GUI - FMWControl = Fusion Middleware Control
- CLI asctl (Scripting language Jython based)
- JMX Client
- DMS metrics are fine graded published in the new FMWControl
But unfortunately a release date for the Oracle AS is not published in the presentation 
, so please be patient.
The full presentation can be found under http://www28.cplan.com/cc176/catalog.jsp and search for Session ID S292004.
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WebUtil and Oracle AS 10.1.2 PatchSet 2 Problem
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During the last weeks I faced with two customers some problems concerning WebUtil and Oracle AS 10.1.2.2.0, e.g. a Reports Call over WebUtil was not working or the WebUtil function file_open_dialog was not working a.s.o. Under Oracle AS 10.1.2.0.2 everything was working fine.
The problem came out of the PatchSet 2 (Patch-No. 4960210) which didn't apply the frmwebutil.jar to the Oracle AS you wanted to patch. To solve this problem just follow these steps:
- unzip the PatchSet 2 to any directory which you prefer
- go to the directory /Disk1/stage/Patches/oracle.developer.forms.builder/10.1.2.2.0/1/DataFiles/ in your unzipped PatchSet 2
- Place the jar utility of the Oracle AS into your $PATH with following command: export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/jdk/bin:$PATH
- Extract the needed frmwebutil.jar from the Java archive webutil.2.2.jar with following command: jar xf webutil.2.2.jar frmwebutil.jar0
Attention: the filename to extract is frmwebutil.jar0 (=Zero)
- Make a backup copy of the actual frmwebutil.jar in your $ORACLE_HOME with following comand: mv $ORACLE_HOME/forms/java/frmwebutil.jar $ORACLE_HOME/forms/java/frmwebutil.jar.save
- Copy the extracted frmwebutil.jar0 to your $ORACLE_HOME with following command: cp frmwebutil.jar0 $ORACLE_HOME/forms/java/frmwebutil.jar
After these steps just restart your Oracle AS or at least restart the OC4J Instance OC4J_BI_Forms and test your Forms Application with your WebUtil functions.
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Network Traffic in Oracle Forms
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Regularly I get the questions from my customers "What is the network traffic in my Forms applications?". A simple way to display the number of transmitted bytes and number of round trips is to add the parameter networkStats=true in your Named Configuration inside your formsweb.cfg configuration file. Additionally you have to modify the corresponding base*.htm or webutil*.htm as follows:
<PARAM NAME="networkStats" VALUE="%networkStats%">
Inside the Tag <EMBED...> add following:
networkStats="%networkStats%"
After the modifications startup your Forms application and in the status bar of your application you'll find on the button right side a counter n:m. Where n = number of transmitted bytes and m = number of round trips.
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Installing WebCache Standalone 10.2.0.2 on Redhat 64bit
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Sometime ago I run in some problems during the installation of Oracle WebCache Standalone 10.2.0.2 on an Redhat 4 x86_64 system. All prerequirements were made, the Oracle Universal Installer didn't complain anything, but during the link process following error message came up:
- error while loading shared libraries: libclntsh.so.10.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
After some investigations my colleague (Engelbert Wystrach) and me came to following solution:
- create as root user following two files in the directory /usr/bin
- gcc296
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/gcc32 -m32 -static-libgcc -B /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-redhat-linux/2.96/ $*
- g++296
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/g++32 -m32 -static-libgcc -B /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-redhat-linux/2.96/ $*
- execute as root following commands:
cd /usr/bin
mv gcc gcc.save
mv g++ g++.save
ln -s /usr/bin/gcc296 /usr/bin/gcc
ln -s /usr/bin/g++296 /usr/bin/g++
After you made this changes, start the Oracle Universal Installer once again and install the Oracle WebCache Standalone.
This error occurs only on Redhat 64bit systems :-(
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Reports 10.1.2. and SuSE Enterprise Linux 10
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Officially the Oracle AS 10.1.2 is not yet certified with SLES 10 and therefor Reports 10.1.2. is not certified. Nevertheless the Oracle AS 10.1.2 is installable on SLES 10, but if you try to run a Report you are receiving an error.
The corresponding logfile $ORACLE_HOME/opmn/logs/OC4J~OC4J_BI_Forms~default_island~1 shows following error stack:
To resolve this problem perform following steps:
- su - root
- cd /usr/X11R6/lib
- mv -f libXm.so.2 libXm.so.2.backup
- ln -s libXm.so.3 libXm.so.2
After that stop and restart the OC4J Instance OC4J_BI_Forms as oracle user:
- opmnctl stopproc process-type=OC4J_BI_Forms
- opmnctl startproc process-type=OC4J_BI_Forms
Now you can run Oracle Reports under SLES 10, but please note, that at the moment Oracle AS 10.1.2 is not yet certified with SLES 10!
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Did you forget the password of the ias_admin user?
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Your colleague installed an Oracle AS Environment, went on holiday and didn't tell you the password of the ias_admin user to access the administrative WebInterface Application Server Control (ASC) or you installed your Oracle AS long time ago and forgot the password of the ias_admin user? If you have an Oracle AS environment which is NOT connected to an Oracle AS Identity Management (IDM), here is a small trick to reset the password of the ias_admin user.
Just go to the directory $ORACLE_HOME/sysman/j2ee/conf. In this directory you'll find the configuration file jazn-data.xml. Inside this configuration file you'll find the definition of the ias_admin user including his encrypted password:
- snippet from jazn-data.xml
<users>
...
<user>
<name>ias_admin</name>
<credentials>{903}YdvTMA...</credentials>
</user>
Inside the tag <credentials> you see the encrypted password of the ias_admin. To reset the password, just change the value inside the tag <credentials> as follows:
- snippet from jazn-data.xml
<users>
...
<user>
<name>ias_admin</name>
<credentials>!mynewpassword1</credentials>
</user>
The new password you have to provide in clear text has to start with a "!". Be aware that the new password must match the password rules: minimum 6 signs and one sign must be a number. After your changes, stop the ASC and restart it with following commands:
- emctl stop iasconsole
- emctl start iasconsole
Now you can login with your new password and inside the jazn-data.xml the provided password in clear text is automatically changed into an encrypted password.
Please note, this trick is only working with Oracle AS Instances, which are NOT connected to an Oracle Identity Management!
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Oracle Internet Directory Light for tnsnames Resolution
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Since a few days the Oracle Authentication Service for Linux (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oid/oracleauthenticationservices.html) is available. Mainly this technology preview is addressed to handle User Authentication of Linux Desktops.
I had a closer look on this product and what I saw is, that the Oracle Authentication Service for Linux is an Oracle Internet Directory (OID) just as an RPM-File (Size 70 MB ). The installation is really simple, download the OID Light and the Oracle XE Database for Linux, and run as root user "rpm -Uhv oracle-oid-10.1.4.2.0-1.0.i386.rpm oracle-xe-univ-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm".
After this you have to configure the Oracle XE Database and the Oracle Internet Directory, execution as root user of the script "/etc/init.d/oracle-oid configure" and answer the following questions:
- Password of sys user of your XE Database
- Password of the OID administrator (cn=orcladmin)
- Ports (Non-SSL and SSL) for the OID
- Naming Context of your OID (e.g. dc=trivadis,dc=com)
- If you want to use SSL Authentification for your OID
And now the interesting part. Many people are planning to migrate their local tnsnames.ora to be stored in an Oracle Internet Directory. Up to now all them had to use the Oracle Application Server 10.1.4.0.1 Identity Management (nearly 1.3 GB ) and an Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. For small companies this is really an overhead! Now you can use this lightweight environment of the Oracle XE Database and the OID Light for Linux.
Following steps need to be performed to load your tnsnames.ora into the OID Light and to configure your clients against it.
- In your Oracle Client configure the sqlnet.ora
NAMES.DIRECTORY_PATH = (LDAP)
NAMES.DEFAULT_DOMAIN = trivadis.com # adjust to your domain
- In your Oracle Client configure the ldap.ora
DIRECTORY_SERVERS = (oassrv01.trivadis.com:389:636) # adjust to your servername and LDAP ports
DEFAULT_ADMIN_CONTEXT = "dc=trivadis,dc=com" # adjust to your Naming Context
DIRECTORY_SERVER_TYPE = OID
After this configuration steps start your netmgr and connect to your OID:
Over the menu option "Command / Directory / Export Net Service Names..." you can import your actual tnsnames.ora into OID Light
For testing whether your Oracle Client is really using your OID or not, just make a small test with tnsping. You should see then "Used LDAP adapter to resolve the alias".
The Oracle Internet Directory Light is really a cool alternative to the huge Oracle Application Server 10g Identity Management, but as usual there are some small limitations in the OID Light (e.g. no MultiMaster Replication, no OPMN, no Cluster Options). But for a small environment or just for testing it is really cool stuff 