I will be speaking at OpenWorld 2013

Session ID: CON9588

Session Title: Get Proactive: Best Practices for Upgrading to Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

Venue / Room: Moscone South - 308

Date and Time: 9/25/13, 17:00 - 18:00

Here are the details

http://oracleus.activeevents.com/2013/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=9588

Promising Changes to handle Severity 1 requests by Oracle Support

Starting October 12 2012 Oracle Support is introducing enhancements in the coming months that provide you greater ability to manage your Severity 1 Service requests online. 

For more details Review Article ID 1495338.1 to learn more. Excerpt below


Managing Severity 1 Service Requests

Online Self Service for managing Severity 1 Service Requests
Oracle Support is reviewing the way that we manage Severity 1 Service Requests. We plan on introducing some enhancements in the coming months that provide you greater ability to manage your Severity 1 Service requests online.

New functionality beginning October 12, 2012
On October 12, 2012, we plan to implement enhancements that will allow you the ability to lower your Severity 1 Service Request without calling into support and view a new "Severity 1 Information" section. NEW SELF-SERVICE OPTION TO LOWER A SEVERITY 1 SERVICE REQUEST For all Severity 1 Service Requests, there will be a new button that allows you to lower the Severity of your Service Request without having to call into support. NEW SEVERITY 1 INFORMATION SECTION Work Hours The new "Severity 1 Information" section will allow you to deactivate 24x7 support by selecting the "Work normal business hours" option. Once you select this option, you will see a pop-up message confirming that you are requesting to work your Severity 1 during normal business hours. It is important to note that once you implement the "Work normal business hours" option, you must telephone support should you need to change the work hours back to 24 x7 support. Outage Status Another feature that you may notice within the new "Severity 1 Information" section is an additional "Outage Status" field. This field will appear when your Service Request is associated with certain Oracle products. Please work with the support engineer assigned to your Service Request to understand how this field should be used.
Look for further enhancements in the near future!

Oracle OpenWorld

I am at Oracle OpenWorld 2011.

Anyone around interested to get together hit me up.

Thanks

Enable SSO for OBIEE 11g ( with 10gAS SSO already in place)

Coming Soon

INVALID BLOCK TYPE Install error 11g

Sometime over the past weekend, my colleague emailed me mentioning that 11g R2 Database server install is failing with error . INVALID BLOCK TYPE

Now what is that??????

Keeping in mind that there is not much to go by. I had one thing to check is that  11gR2 build are 2 huge zip files

Now with files these big , there is one thing that I would definitely advice is to do checksum validation.

With every download from Oracle, there is a digest or checksum provided with the file to crosscheck with downloaded files. Eg below

You can do these checksum validations from any platform for any platform (For HP UX Installations from LINUX Machine)

On Linux this utility is part of standard build.

I did the cksum utility on 2 files which had been downloaded

 On the files that were existing ( Check values in bold that is checksum no and other no. is size)

Run of command came back as

I asked my colleague to download the installation again and new files came back with the checksum run as below (Watch the numbers are matching)

 

You can use cksum or md5sum utility whichever information is provided to compare with.

Oracle EM Grid Control 11g Launch

With special invitations and hopefully the recognition of my team's effort to scale new heights by using this tool, I have very special interest in this.

My colleague Naveen Garg being named "EM Architect of the Year" last year will also be there.


Here is the registration details and with livecast on web its surely to be attended by huge crowd

Let me know if you have any questions.

Also you can listen to Richard Sarwal, Oracle Corporation over here

You can register for event here

Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Launch April 22, 2010 l Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

See you all there

Enable Single Sign on (SSO) for OBIEE Presentation Server (Troubleshooting)

There are whole lot of post out there and also if one follows the document which is very well detailed, things work fine, until .........



1) This command to be run on SSO Server

$ORACLE_HOME/sso/bin/ssoreg.sh -oracle_home_path $ORACLE_HOME \
-site_name bi-dev2.abc.com \
-config_mod_osso TRUE \
-mod_osso_url http://bi-dev2.abc.com \
-update_mode MODIFY \
-remote_midtier \
-config_file $ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/conf/osso/biosso-bi-dev2.conf

2)
RDP (remote desktop login) to bi-dev2

3)
cd c:\product\10.1.3\OracleAS_1\Apache\Apache\conf\osso\

4)
cp biosso-bi-dev2.conf (file from step1 ) to above path (step 3)


5)
cd c:\product\10.1.3\OracleAS_1\Apache\Apache\conf\

6)
make a copy of mod_osso.conf


7)
Modify mod_osso.conf as follows

Add line
OssoConfigFile c:\product\10.1.3\OracleAS_1\Apache\Apache\conf\osso\biosso-bi-dev2.conf


Also add below section under IfModule tag

    Header unset Pragma
    OssoSendCacheHeaders off
    AuthType Basic
    require valid-user


8)

Make a copy of httpd.conf file under c:\product\10.1.3\OracleAS_1\Apache\Apache\conf\

uncomment include “Oracle_HOME/Apache/Apache/conf/mod_osso.conf”


9)
Restart apache server

c:\product\10.1.3\OracleAS_1\opmn/bin/opmnctl restartproc process-type=HTTP_Server


-------All is good till here------------------

10)

Create impersonator user in Administration Utility (password is longliveme)

11) Make a copy of file OracleBIData_HOME\web\config\credentialstore.xml


12) Modify Credentials Store to include new impersonator user
    OracleBIData_HOME\web\config\credentialstore.xml. Run crypto tool to get impersonator user in credential store

cryptotools credstore -add -infile c:\oracleBIdata\web\config\credentialstore.xml

C:\OracleBI\web\bin>cryptotools credstore -add -infile c:\oracleBIdata\web\confi
g\credentialstore.xml
>Credential Alias: impersonation
>Username: Impersonator
>Password: ********* (longliveme)
>Do you want to encrypt the password? y/n (y):
>Passphrase for encryption: ********* (secret)
>Do you want to write the passphrase to the xml? y/n (n): n
>File "c:\oracleBIdata\web\config\credentialstore.xml" exists. Do you want to ov
erwrite it? y/n (y): y





13) Make a copy of file c:\OracleBIData\web\config\instanceconfig.xml ( we will register our user to see the credential store for all SSO user and login as impersonator user)


14) Add following under serverinstance tag

<CredentialStore>
    <CredentialStorage type="file" path="c:\oracleBIdata\web\config\credentialstore.xml" passphrase="secret"/>
</CredentialStore>
   


   

Also in the same file add


<Auth>
    <SSO enabled="true">
        <ParamList>
            <!--IMPERSONATE param is used to get the authenticated user's username and is required -->
            <Param name="IMPERSONATE"
            source="serverVariable"
            nameInSource="REMOTE_USER"/>
        </ParamList>
        <LogoffUrl> https://ssoserver.abc.com:3060/pls/orasso/orasso.wwsso_app_admin.ls_logout?p_done_url=http%3A%2F%2Fbi-dev2.abc.com:80%2Fanalytics%2F</LogoffUrl>
        <LogonUrl> https://ssoserver.abc.com:3060/pls/orasso/orasso.wwsso_app_admin.ls_login</LogonUrl>
    </SSO>
</Auth>
   

When I started doing the above steps and followed the document

I was hitting the following error on start of presentation server

C:\OracleBI\web\bin>sawserver.exe
Type: Information
Severity: 30
Time: Tue Mar 09 11:44:13 2010
File: project/sawserver/sawserver.cpp Line: 386
Properties: ThreadID-1668
Location:
        saw.sawserver
        saw.sawserver.initializesawserver
        saw.sawserver

Oracle BI Presentation Services 10.1.3.4.1 (Build 090414.1900) are starting up.
---------------------------------------
Type: Error
Severity: 20
Time: Tue Mar 09 11:44:13 2010
File: project/sawserver/winmain.cpp Line: 74
Properties: ThreadID-1668
Location:
        saw.sawserver.initializesawserver
        saw.sawserver

Invalid encrypted block.


Here is the solution for this.

In the credentialstore.xml there is already a user like either admin or Scheduleradmin and now we have our user "impersonator"

The passphrase in instanceconfig.xml applies to all the users in credentialstore.

Now if the users that already existed and were encrypted using some other passphrase in the past (default is "password")
then we hit the above error.

Solution is to either change passphrase of your user (impersonator) to "password" while using cryptotools or change all users in there to use your passphrase "secret"

Let me know if you need a demo or example of this or any more clarification , will be glad to help

File Locations above :- instanceconfig.xml and credentialstore.xml both reside in BIDATAHOME/web/config

Thanks
IK