The Stage I Fear The Most

Since I became a team leader I've been working more and more with Oracle products other than EBS, mainly iAS and OID. I've noticed that the installation part of iAS-like installations never fails, the stage I've really learned to hate is the Configuration Assistants - each one that completes gives me a sigh of relief, but too many times I'm cursing instead. 

For instance, lately I've been trying to upgrade my 10.2.0.2 OID instance to the latest 10.1.4.3 version, upgrade path looks like this: 10.2.0.2->10.1.4.0.1->upgrade MR->10.1.4.3.

10.1.4.0.1 - check. upgrade MR - check. 10.1.4.3 - uh oh...

Even before installation begins, Oracle tries to outsmart me - documentation says to shut down OPMN, but when I do that I get an error during the initial steps that says it can't determine running processes(like daaaa!). OK, so I start OPMN, but then I get a "dude, you're running services that bother me" message, "OK take it easy, I'm shutting it down" is my reply. Up until now I have the upper hand and the installation itself runs smoothly, as always.

But then comes the one before last CA - the DCM CA that fails because of a problem with an Apache dll. So after trying to solve it for quite some time (replaced dlls, configuration files, etc.) without any positive results I opened an SR, the action plan , is kinda funny - install 10.1.2.3 on top of 10.1.4.0.1, then try again, makes sense don't you think? Well, it does (a bit), my previous attempt did include a 10.1.2.3 upgrade before 10.1.4.01, some maybe I should've thought about it myself.

So I did just that, but then the SSO CA took ages (more like two hours, but you get the idea) to fail, some mixture of opmn stopall/startall got it through but now the OPMN startall CA fails so I didn't even got to the problematic DCM CA yet, I guess I have some frustrating days ahead...

With the CAs I always have the urge to just skip 'em all and run 'em later, on the other hand if things are wrong with the so basic OPMN startall maybe I should handle things now. I'll probably have more updates regarding this issue in following posts.

Linguistics Tip

OK, so we all know that when facing language issues, playing with NLS_LANG often does the trick, but a while ago we had an issue with a web app (running on iAS) that would show normally Hebrew characters for strings taken from configuration files but would transform any Hebrew data from the database into question marks. The interesting thing was that the same application running from a workstation worked perfectly. 

We were starting to get desperate, as more and more people looked at it and didn't manage to find a solution. But when I showed it to the DBA in my team he solved it in five minutes, luckily, he had a similar issue the week before.

Here's the trick, sometimes you have to modify the language settings for the server itself. Actually it's not enough to change the language settings, you have to check this annoying check box as well:

We've obviously played with the Regional Settings before just never even looked at this tab and hence didn't see any changes.