dannorris.com blog – Page 10 – dannorris.com blog

Another “special” circumstance when running OAS on Windows

We encountered an “interesting” challenge recently where some, not all, OC4J containers in an Oracle Application Server 10.1.3.1.0 installation would “crash” (they would stop running). There was no apparent pattern to the “crazy” crashing containers. The system administrator was actively doing application (re)deployments at the rate of 3-4 per week. The containers seemed to be … Continue reading “Another “special” circumstance when running OAS on Windows”

We encountered an “interesting” challenge recently where some, not all, OC4J containers in an Oracle Application Server 10.1.3.1.0 installation would “crash” (they would stop running). There was no apparent pattern to the “crazy” crashing containers. The system administrator was actively doing application (re)deployments at the rate of 3-4 per week. The containers seemed to be “crashing” randomly, sometimes throughout the day, sometimes just after a deployment.

We increased many timeouts for OPMN as we believed that OPMN was just incorrectly “seeing” the containers as down and restarting them. OPMN restarts them by shutting them down first and then starting them.

We filed cases with Oracle support to no avail–they didn’t come up with any useful suggestions in a week or more. They were trying, but didn’t come up with the solution.

The system administrator developed a theory based on what he believed was a pattern. Every time he did a deployment, he would notice a crash of all the non-Oracle default containers. That is, the home and OC4J_WebCenter containers didn’t crash.

The deployment process that he followed resulted in him connecting to the server using remote desktop. His remote desktop client was configured with the /console option which was required by some other servers he managed, more about that later.

Once he was able to demonstrate that he could make the containers crash each time he logged off, we started testing variations using the system console, the remote desktop client with and without the /console option and found a pattern. The remote desktop client without the /console option did not cause a crash, but all other combinations did. Through all of this, the home and OC4J_WebCenter containers remained up and running.

Bottom line: Read Metalink Note 245609.1 which documents the apparently, well-known fact that logging out from the Windows console causes JVM termination. The very simple fix is to start the containers with the “-Xrs” option which tells the JVM to ignore certain signals from the OS.

The really terrible thing about all this is that Oracle puts the -Xrs option on the containers deployed during the installation, but the OEM tool doesn’t add them to the container startup parameters for the custom containers. Easy to fix, even easy to find once you know what to look for.

This begs two questions:

Why doesn’t Oracle add -Xrs to the startup options for the containers created after the initial installation? That would have avoided all the problems and there’s apparently no negative side effect–at least not that we’ve seen.
How could an SR analyst not find this Metalink note and refer us to the simple solution? Granted, we didn’t find it easily in our searches either, but eventually it was one of us that found the article and solution. Now that we know the fix, a simple search for -Xrs on Metalink gets plenty of hits. As they say, hindsight is 20/20.

Hopefully, this information will help some of you that are lucky enough to work on OC4J deployments on Windows.

Oracle 11g DB Available For Windows

Oracle 11g Database is now available on Windows. Get it while it’s hot :).

Oracle OpenWorld in sight, 3 weeks away

Just looked at my calendar and realized that we’re less than a month away from Oracle OpenWorld! There are tons of great sessions on the list and my schedule is full after even just a quick scan. That means there will certainly be hard times ahead as new sessions catch my eye (there are always … Continue reading “Oracle OpenWorld in sight, 3 weeks away”

Just looked at my calendar and realized that we’re less than a month away from Oracle OpenWorld! There are tons of great sessions on the list and my schedule is full after even just a quick scan. That means there will certainly be hard times ahead as new sessions catch my eye (there are always a few) and I have to make the hard decisions on the fly.

If you’re looking for RAC information, check out the sessions hosted by the RAC SIG and the RAC SIG events. They’re all posted on the RAC SIG website at http://www.oracleracsig.org/. As you’ll see, Sunday is the IOUG User Group Forum Day and many of us will be spending time in Moscone West to attend these great sessions. There are also some RAC SIG events on Monday and Tuesday as well, so be sure to attend them as well.

My presentations are on the schedule finally. If you’re interested in what I have to say, stop by these sessions:

Sunday, 10am, Moscone West 2002-L2: High Availability Options for Oracle Database, S292927
Sunday, 1pm, Moscone West 2005-L2: Is That Really You? (Co-presented with Matt Topper), S292939
Monday, 4:45pm, Hilton Yosemite Room C: RAC For Beginners: The Basics, S291026

I’ll also be attending the RAC SIG events, so you can spot me there. When not attending those sessions, I’ll either be hanging out in the Unconference area, the OTN Lounge, the Piocon exhibit hall booth, or off watching some of the other great sessions.

I’ll post my complete schedule and planned sessions as the start of the conference gets closer. Hope to see you there. I’m also online at the OpenWorld Connect site. Look me up (dannorris) and join the RAC SIG group there as well.

I’m an Advanced Diver

I think I caught the scuba diving bug because after I got the initial certification, I’ve been working to figure out how I can get more certifications and more diving into my schedule! I cautiously signed up to do my PADI Advanced Open Water certification dives on October 6-7 fearing that it may be very … Continue reading “I’m an Advanced Diver”

For Advanced Open Water certification, you have to do five dives. The first three are mandatory for everyone: Underwater Navigation, Deep, and Night. Then, you pick two more from a list of 5-7 (can’t remember exactly) others. My two electives were: Peak Performance Buoyancy and Wreck Diving. Of the five dives, my favorite was the Deep Dive. It was in a place in Haigh Quarry referred to as “the hole”. It’s a relatively small place in the back of the quarry (read: long surface swim) that goes down to a platform at 80 feet. As expected, the water got quite cold at depth and the usual cloudiness in the water made it pretty dim down there as well. Those carrying computers reported that the water temperature at 80 feet was 49 degrees. We stayed there for a few minutes and did a few games to test ourselves for nitrogen narcosis, a common condition at deeper depths. I wasn’t experiencing any signs during my test–not sure about the others.

I managed to convince my wife to let me go on a dive trip with a dive buddy (that I’ve known since grade school). We go to Cozumel on December 14th–less than 2 months away!

Congratulations to all my dive buddies in the Advanced OW class–we all passed. Thanks also to Eunice Z (our esteemed dive mistress and instructor) as well as Divemaster Ted who was great at getting us all down to the cold depths.

Oracle OpenWorld OTN Unconference Event

I’m excited to see that Oracle has a group of people paying attention to trends in technology events and making sure that Oracle’s events keep up with the industry. If you’re going to be at OpenWorld, be sure to stop by the OTN Unconference event. I expect that I’ll be hanging out up there regularly throughout the first part of the week. I haven’t been lucky enough to attend an Unconference-style event, but I’ve heard a lot about them and they sound like great networking opportunities and great places to learn some great new tidbits.

Kudos to Justin K and the OTN team for putting Conference 2.0 (I think I just made that up) into OOW.

Oracle (Thor) stays near the front of User Provisioning Magic Quadrant

For those that pay attention to the Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, you might be interested to see that Oracle made a good choice with their acquisition of Thor. The acquired product, now known as Oracle Identity Manager, has placed Oracle in the leaders area of the latest User Provisioning report from Gartner. Nishant’s Talking Identity … Continue reading “Oracle (Thor) stays near the front of User Provisioning Magic Quadrant”

For those that pay attention to the Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, you might be interested to see that Oracle made a good choice with their acquisition of Thor. The acquired product, now known as Oracle Identity Manager, has placed Oracle in the leaders area of the latest User Provisioning report from Gartner. Nishant’s Talking Identity blog summarized the report last week. Read the full report.

IOUG Forum at Oracle Users Forum Day at OpenWorld

The IOUG Forum is shaping up to be a great program of sessions at Oracle OpenWorld on Sunday, November 10th. The Sunday program consists of more than 35 SIG meetings and technical sessions starting at 8:30am and running through 5:30pm. So, for those of you that are using Sunday as a travel day, you may arrive in time to attend the last session of the day starting at 4pm. Please check out our sessions using the online OOW Schedule Builder tool and add us to your personal itinerary. You can search the itinerary using the keyword IOUG and choose Sunday from the search criteria to see all the IOUG Forum sessions and meetings on Sunday.

In addition to the Sunday program, the IOUG was also given more than 20 session slots in the regular conference program. Those sessions are listed in a spreadsheet at IOUG’s announcement on OpenWorld events.

The RAC SIG is sponsoring several of the sessions as well as holding a Birds of a Feather session at 4pm on Sunday as well. Keep watching this site and the RAC SIG website for more details as the conference gets closer.

Bharosa software now available for download

Oracle finally closed the deal with Bharosa that I wrote about several weeks ago. They haven’t posted it yet on OTN, but it’s on edelivery.oracle.com under the name “Oracle Adaptive Access Manager”. The documentation isn’t quite up to normal Oracle documentation standards, but it’s enough to get the install up and running. I’m getting my … Continue reading “Bharosa software now available for download”

Oracle finally closed the deal with Bharosa that I wrote about several weeks ago. They haven’t posted it yet on OTN, but it’s on edelivery.oracle.com under the name “Oracle Adaptive Access Manager”. The documentation isn’t quite up to normal Oracle documentation standards, but it’s enough to get the install up and running. I’m getting my own VM installed with this stuff configured and tested, I’ll post some results here.

To find this new stuff, go to http://edelivery.oracle.com/, fill out the form, search for “Oracle Application Server Products” and choose your platform (I chose Linux x86). The first search result returned will likely be “Oracle Adaptive Access Manager 10g (10.1.4.2.0)”. That’s Oracle’s name for the Bharosa software. The downloads are tiny–only about 45Mb total. Happy downloading!

I’m one of those guys

It’s official, I’m one of these guys. I’m excited an honored to join the ranks and look forward to meeting the other Oracle ACE Directors at OpenWorld in November. I’m also looking forward to interfacing with Oracle more closely and continuing my blogging and writing habits as well. There are some truly amazing technologists in … Continue reading “I’m one of those guys”

To the other Oracle ACE Directors and 39,000+ other of you, see you in SF in November! 🙂

BTW, for those that are interested, check out my ACE profile.

It’s all in the bag

I recently changed jobs and found myself in need of a new computer bag. I originally went for the same bag that I had a few years ago from Dell. Unfortunately, they didn’t change the name, but they changed the bag completely–and for the worse. So, I went on a hunt for a solid, nice computer bag that I could use to run my life. After all, a computer bag to a computer consultant is sort of like a purse to a mother of four children (I only have two, so this is based on stories I’ve heard): it holds your entire life and finding things in it quickly is key to your daily happiness.

I hunted high and low, bought at least 4 bags from the typical computer stores locally and, one by one, took them all back. Finally, I asked my good friend Matt Topper, who generally knows lots of useless things, for a recommendation. As usual, he came through with what may be my last computer bag ever: The Empire Builder from Tom Bihn. The only negative thing I can say about this critical piece of equipment is that it is fairly expensive. Once you get beyond that and realize that it’s worth it because it’ll last you forever, you won’t be sorry. It’s a great piece of equipment and I actually paid them to write this testimonial. In fact, I may buy another bag from them at some point if I need something else (smaller or backpack style or something else).

So, if anyone wants to ask me for a shoulder-style computer bag, you now know what I’ll recommend.