Saturday, November 8, 2008

Digging

One of the abilities a sysadmin must have is the ability to dig. What do I mean when I say "dig"? Well, I mean that many times you face a problem that seems to be rooted deeply inside the system, and a sysadmin has to know how to solve these problems. The first thing I personally do most of the times is to say "OK, that's as far as I'm going, time for official support", but as I wrote before, this usually ends up with me de-compiling Oracle's code.

Time for an example.
I've recently been trying to utilize Oracle's ESM (Enterprise Security Manager), since the system it's intended for requires batch actions I used the command line tool. Guess what, when I use one of the commands the GUI stops showing associated roles for the related Enterprise Role, since it was obviously a coding bug, I've logged an SR thinking to myself that this bug, if reproducible (and it is) means no one have ever tested this functionality. About a month later I was notified that a fix was created and they're testing it. Two days later - bad news, the fix did not pass testing. And this is actually the current status (a few months have passed by now).
Last week I got tired of this whole thing  so I've started digging for the source of the problem. Apparently, when you use the command line, the record generated in the OID has a case mistake. So my next move was to de-compile Oracle's code and fix it, and voila, it works!
When I told the support analyst about my fix, he said he knows the solution is easy but the problem is that they have some incompatibility issue with different database versions. I really don't care if it's reasonable for such a small fix to be taking such a long time to implement, I'm just happy I know how to dig.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

These things make you say "grrrrr".
IMHO, most sysadmins don't dig as far as you do. Some don't know how to, some don't care enough, some are from a specific origin in the world which I rather not talk about (but it has something to do with the one that "handles" the SR).
Imagine the damage created by such poor handling of a SR. What if your client couldn't tolerate such a long delay?
I hope you remember the reason the entire thing was done in the first place, and that the big solution works (hey, it's complicated a lil').
Finally, could you make the line in the blog (visually) shorter? A line should be about 62 characters, and I think blogger's templates were created with such things in mind. Long lines (on a wide screen) are hard to read.

Unknown said...

The big solution works, had to make some fixes to Adir's scripts but it works. Obviously some more adjustments are required. I'll keep in mind the comment about line length.