Kipper's Blog

I had never installed one-off patches before and last week I got my first opportunity. I turned out to be a nightmare!! I could not get it to work. Oracle support could not figure out my problem!! At the end of the day it turned out to be 2 very simple things. One of them Oracle support had never encountered!

Errors:
There is no $ORACLE_HOME to apply the patch to.

and
Same error: opendir(/opt/product/IAS/10.1.2.0.2/reports/../../../../..): Permission denied at /opt/product/IAS/10.1.2.0.2/reports/OPatch/perl_modules/Command.pm line 8384

Main problem opatch lsinventory could not accept the ORACLE_HOME for the reports server.

First solution. We found /etc/oraInst.loc pointing to a different Oracle app inventory which was the Oracle Warehouse Builder. Apparently the OWB installation puts that file there even though we set it in the OWB_HOME prior to the installation. Changing this file to point to the correct inventory was necessary. This is common issue if you have more than one Oracle application running on the same server under the same user. You need to update the oraInst.loc in /etc/ whenever you need to apply patches.

Second solution. This part had the Oracle Support scratching their heads. Still opatch lsinventory complained about ORACLE_HOME not being set – even though echo $ORACLE_HOME output was correct. They asked us to get UNIX admin to unmount the partition and remount it as readable. We tried that and a half other odd fixes without success. Finally Oracle support asked me to give them some trace dumps for them to analyze. The solution ended simply to make / readable by all!

How it was with ls -ld /
drwxr-x--x 35 root root 1024 Oct 1 00:52 /

After fix
drwxr-xr-x 35 root root 1024 Oct 1 01:52 /

Apparently the unix fellow who setup these servers for us thought it would be a security benefit if / was unreadable by all except root user. Unfortunately, Oracle cannot patch any of its applications with one-off patches when / unreadable by the oracle user.

Configure The Domain’s httpd.conf

vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/yourdomain.conf

<Location /WEB-INF/ >  # (1)
    AllowOverride None
    deny from all
 </Location>
 <Location /META-INF/ > # (2)
    AllowOverride None
    deny from all
 </Location> 

  JkAutoAlias /home/userX/tomcat/webapps # (3)
  JkMount /* tomcat1 # (4)
  JkMount /*/* tomcat1 # (5)
  JkUnMount /php/* tomcat1 # (6)

Setup init.d Script

<div id="_mcePaste">#!/bin/sh
# Tomcat Startup Script

start() {

echo -n "Starting up tomcat1"
su username -c /home/username/tomcat/bin/start.sh

}
stop() {

echo -n "Stopping tomcat1"
su username -c /home/username/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh

}

# See how we are called.
case "$1" in
        start)
                start
                ;;
        stop)
                stop
                ;;
        restart)
                stop
                start
                ;;
        *)
                echo $"Usage: tomcat {start|stop|restart}"
                exit
        esac

cd /etc/rc3.d/
ln -s ../init.d/tomcat.sh S99tomcatStartup

Restart Apache

Steps for part 1

Steps for part 2

Install Apache Tomcat Connector

./configure --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs  (or wherever your apxs is)
make
su -c 'make install';

workers.properties

worker.list=tomcat1 # (1)
worker.tomcat1.port=8007 # (2)
worker.tomcat1.host=localhost # (3)
worker.tomcat1.type=ajp13 # (4)

httpd_jk.conf File

Next step is to install Apache Tomcat Container

ln -s apache-tomcat-6.0.29 tomcat

Configure server.xml

<Alias>www.domainX.com</Alias>

Add context path before closing host tag if you plan to use webapp other than ROOT:

<Context path=""
	docBase="/home/username/tomcat/webapps/webappName" crossContext="false" reloadable="true">
</Context>

Set JAVA_HOME

chmod +x jdk-6u21-linux-i586.bin

./jdk-6u21-linux-i586.bin

JAVA_HOME=/opt/java/jdk-1.6_21
export JAVA_HOME

cd tomcat/bin/
./catalina.sh run (if you want to watch the output - same as catalina.out log)
./startup.sh (or start it up and forget about it)

There are 2 kinds of Julian dates. One that counts daily since time of Julius Caesar or the julian date based on current year. The latter seems to be more popular. Todays date is August 31st which is 2010243 or 10243 Julian date. This equals to 243 days since the first day of the year. There are some examples on the net but they get fancy with finding the leap year to taking actual julian date 2455440. The problem with many is they include the time of day as well and thus result in creating Perl code to clean it up. The method I use below comprises of just 3 subroutines, one to get todays date, another to calculate the days since the first of the year and finally puts together the last 2 digits of the year and the total days since the first.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Time::localtime; ### For get_date subroutine

## Declare variables for date handling
my $yyyy;  	
my $mo;  	
my $da;		


  &get_date(0); # Pass number of days in past to current or past date. 0 = today, 1 is yesterday etc.
   
   my $jyyy = $yyyy; #Since we need to make year unique for julian part.

   my $dayOfYear = &dayofyear($da,$mo,$jyyy); # Figure days of the year using subroutine.
   $jyyy -= 2000; # Removes the first 2 digits - likely a y2k gotcha if we used 1900 in 20th century.
   
   my $julianDate = $jyyy . $dayOfYear; # Put year and days together
   my $todaysDate = $yyyy . "/" . $mo . "/" . $da; # Put together todays date
   
   print "Todays date is $todaysDate \n";
   print "julianDate is $julianDate \n"; # Output 20100831 will = 10243


# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
# get number of days since first of the Year - Julian
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------

sub dayofyear {
    my ($day1,$month,$year)=@_;  # Passed todays date information
    my @cumul_d_in_m =
(0,31,59,90,120,151,181,212,243,273,304,334,365);
    my $doy=$cumul_d_in_m[--$month]+$day1;
    return $doy if $month < 2;
    return $doy unless $year % 4 == 0;
    return ++$doy unless $year % 100 == 0;
    return $doy unless $year % 400 == 0;
    return ++$doy;
}

# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
# get local time or past date.
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------

sub get_date {
   my $pastno = shift;
   my $pastdate = localtime(time -(86400 * $pastno));
   $yyyy = $pastdate->year() + 1900;  # localtime->year() return years since 1900
   $mo = $pastdate->mon() + 1;        # localtime->mon() return 0-11,  Jan. - Dec.
   $da = $pastdate->mday();

   $mo = "0"."$mo"  if ($mo <= 9);
   $da = "0"."$da"  if ($da <= 9);
   
}

Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g currently does not support Data Guard that makes it easy to switch databases or migrate to another server and database. I ran into this similar limitation and had originally opted to redeploying all the mapping from the MDL export. This process what taking me between 4 to 6 hours because the Control Center GUI is extremely (not to mention painfully) slow. Finaly we worked with Oracle support to find a better solution to this problem. After some testing and several successful switched and migrations I have formulated the steps below.

Goal
Move SID and OWB installation and mappings to another server.

I know there is a module that does this for you such as use Time::Elapse, but where I work, adding modules is a pain, and requires getting permission from upper management. I just find it easier to create the functionality myself.

My objective – to take 2 time stamps from a file and calculate the time lapse in minutes.


#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $start   = "02:01:16";
my $end     = "07:12:30";
my ($startHR, $startMIN) = split(/:/, $start); # split the time by colon to separate the hour and minutes.
my $startMinutes = ($startHR*60) + $startMIN; # Convert start time to minutes
my ($endHR, $endMIN) = split(/:/, $end); # start over with end time
my $endMinutes = ($endHR*60) + $endMIN;
my $range = $endMinutes - $startMinutes; # finally subtract the two.
print $range;

The result is 311 minutes.

Technically this is not my first post. I have blogged in the past which you can find here: http://jklarsen.com/myblog.

I decided to start a new blog with entirely different focus on jklarsen.com. My goal with this blog is to share my experience with the technology field of IT. I am also deaf which provides some challenging obstacles at times and may be interesting how I get round those obstacles.

Currently I work for a large bank where I administer some of the Oracle applications as well as automate many of the nightly processing using bash, perl and autosys. I will dig back first to share some things I’ve learned, mistakes I’ve made and my thoughts on some of the technology that we use.