Oracle Tales

Recently I was alerted that after an upgrade, PeopleSoft SSO was no longer working. When users tried to access a trusted instance i.e. from FSCM->HCM, they were missing CSS on the page and it contained the error "STR_PCMINVPORTAL: Invalid portal name EMPLOYEE in request" on the page. This was puzzling, because the only info on Oracle support was related to the Interaction Hub aka Portal. After talking with support, it turns out the issue was related to a PeopleTools upgrade. In PT853 you did not need to set the urls on the node tabs. Now this is mandatory.  We also need to make 1 additional change to the webprofile because we are still using classic mode. Steps below: You must set the node url on the portal tab for local AND remote nodes .  This is as of PT854 and newer. Any node that shows up under PeopleTools ->Security Objects->Single Signon must have the Context URI Text and Portal URI Text values set to point at the URL's for the remote systems. You m

Recently I have been using Docker to build out an Apache reverse proxy in development. The advantages of using Docker in this scenario are: Increased Security through isolation - Docker containers jail your application so that the main operating system hosting the container is protected. The containers are ephemeral and can be rebuilt in seconds. Some organizations rebuild their applications on a nightly basis. Fast Deployment - Once your docker file is setup you can deploy docker containers in seconds. This makes it very simple to graduate changes from development to production or rebuild infrastructure in DR scenario Cloud Friendly  - Docker containers are very portable. If suddenly your organization wants to move to cloud infrastructure or hosting providers, it is a relatively simple task to move these containers. Additionally, cloud companies like Amazon, Azure are heavily invested in Docker and already have many of the tools in place for organizations using Docker. Wh

This is a handy script I've used in the past to benchmark a Linux server.  It's helpful when you want to compare the performance between 2 systems. #!/bin/bash #basic benchmark script echo "Running basic benchmark against "$HOSTNAME cname=$(cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep name|head -1|awk '{ $1=$2=$3=""; print }') cores=$(cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep MHz|wc -l) freq=$(cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep MHz|head -1|awk '{ print $4 }') tram=$(free -m | awk 'NR==2'|awk '{ print $2 }') swap=$(free -m | awk 'NR==4'| awk '{ print $2 }') up=$(uptime|awk '{ $1=$2=$(NF-6)=$(NF-5)=$(NF-4)=$(NF-3)=$(NF-2)=$(NF-1)=$NF=""; print }') echo "Downloading Test File....." cache=$((wget --no-check-certificate -O /dev/null https://google.com/somelargetestfile) 2>&1 | tail -2 | head -1 | awk '{print $3 $4 }') echo "Testing I/O...." io=$( (dd if=/dev/zero of=test_$$ bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync &

Every quarter (January, April, July, October) Oracle releases their CPU (Critical Patch Updates) for all Oracle products. For PeopleSoft there are quite a few different products that require individual patching. Assuming you are running the full Oracle Stack, within the Oracle CPU you should be looking for security patches to: • Weblogic • Tuxedo • PeopleTools (dot level patches not major release) • PeopleSoft Applications (while rare, security issues do come up in HCM,ELM,etc applications) • Oracle Database • Oracle Linux The most significant of these that requires patching is Weblogic. The easiest place to find this patches is on the Weblogic DocID page within My Oracle Support. Patch Set Update (PSU) Release Listing for Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) (Doc ID 1470197.1) Once you have the patch downloaded, there is no need to unzip it, you are ready to start patching.This example will be done on a Linux based PUM appliance First set the variables to your java home, we

I seem to be on the Oracle Enterprise manager kick lately, so why not one more post on it. Recently I hit the 85% mark on the Fast Recovery Area due to archive log bloat and did not see any alerts triggered in OEM. Well as I discovered, part of the reason for this is that according to MOS, "If using Fast Recovery Area (FRA) for the archive destination and the destination is set to USE_DB_RECOVERY_FILE_DEST, then the Archive Area % Used metric will not trigger anymore." Well that is annoying. However, I did find that the alert does trigger, but it is buried and doesn't show up on any main pages. To see it, go to the target database home page. Then navigate to Oracle Database->Monitoring->All Metrics . In the left pane you can scroll down to “ Recovery Area->Recovery Area Free Space ”.  There you will see your alert if active. When viewing the All Metrics page, click on the alerts icon to see active alerts. If you want to see it triggered just temporaril

Oracle Enterprise Manager 13 has a nice feature that shows the last backup timestamp on the home page of each target database. You can see this info directly in the SYSMAN.MGMT$HA_BACKUP table of the EM repository database. However , sometimes you may notice that this time stamp is older than the latest current backup . To add to the confusion if you navigate to "Availability->Backup&Recovery ->Backup Reports, you will see the true current time stamp which doesn't align with the time stamp shown on the target page. This is because the metric collection job that updates the SYSMAN.MGMT$HA_BACKUP table, only runs every 12 hours by default. At 12am/pm UTC. If you would like a particular target to update more frequently, you can use emcli . Example command shown below ./emcli modify_collection_schedule \ -targetType="oracle_database" \ -targetNames="MYDB" -collectionName="haconfig1_collection" \ -freqType="HOUR" -freqValue=&quo

While Windows PowerShell does come with Remote PowerShell  it can be a bit cumbersome to work with. I find SSH to be far simpler in multi-OS environments. (If you're a pure Windows shop, consider sticking with Remote PowerShell). Setting up SSH is on Windows is now easier then ever with the Chocolatey repository. #To install Chocolatey - from elevated PowerShell Prompt iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 -UseBasicParsing | iex #To install openssh with ssh daemon choco install openssh -params '"/SSHServerFeature"' -y At this point you should be able to ssh from this machine and to this machine #To connect to another ssh server from the host with ssh installed ssh remoteserverip or hostname To connect to this Windows machine, use your preferred ssh client and login as a user with local admin on the machine. i.e. ssh adminstrator@windowsmachineip Now, optionally you can setup SSH key authentication. # To enable ssh keyauth Restart Windows #To

Collecting statistics on Oracle databases for PeopleSoft is unique, due to the way PeopleSoft is designed to be "database agnostic". As result the built-in means to collect statistics on Oracle databases is not known to work well with PeopleSoft installations. Therefore, some custom settings are recommended. See Oracle documentation E-ORA Methods to Gather Statistics on PeopleSoft Oracle Databases (Doc ID 1345124.1). Basic Setup This is a high level walk through of statistics collection for PeopleSoft on Oracle database 11g+. First, disable the built in job called the ”auto optimizer stats collection”.  To disable it, run the SQL below:  (this assumes your schema is SYSADM) BEGIN DBMS_AUTO_TASK_ADMIN.DISABLE( client_name => 'auto optimizer stats collection', operation => NULL, window_name => NULL); END; / Next, we need to setup some database preferences. According to Oracle Doc ID 1345124.1, we should set our preferences as follows and th