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Well, part of starting Ora-Click I wanted to start a series of blogs covering the top 5 articles of the week. Due to some technical difficulties I’m a week late, but I promise to make it extra extra interesting. So without further ado here are the top 5.
- The big story of the week wasn’t Jakes post on the “8 Things” but actually the User Your Nose to Install an Oracle Database article. Some people claim that Oracle software is among the hardest to install. I tend to agree many of the earlier releases (<8) were a pain in the butt, but Oracle’s come a long way since then. Just to prove it Howard posted a link showing exactly how easy it is. I would love to link to it, but as I’ll discuss later Howard has shut down his blog until the “8 Things” craze slows down. When he gets back to earth the article can be found here.
- The second article covers the new fixes and features of the latest mix.oracle.com release. I’m proud to be member 41 on the site and really think its a great way to get open and honest customer feedback. As the site grows there’s definitely some new features that need to be added to help manage consuming all the new content but knowing the AppsLab guys they’re already working on it. I would love to see Oracle open up the source to mix, as suggested by Jake here. I know that Anthony and Rich are overloaded fixing bugs and working on new features, it would be great to have the Oracle Continue Reading
Just a quick post on something I was working on, my father passed away suddenly yesterday so I don’t have as much time to put into this post as I had hoped. Anyways, over the holiday I put together a quick Ubuntu VMWare virtual machine with Oracle XE, the new 11g Technical Preview 3 jDeveloper release and the SOA suite. Over the last week I uploaded it to Amazon S3 and am now distributing it as a torrent. Here are the links to the four torrent files (Amazon doesn’t let you compress multiple files into a single torrent).
https://matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk1.zip.torrent
https://matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk2.zip.torrent
https://matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk3.zip.torrent
https://matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk4.zip.torrent
It is a VMWare virtual machine, personally I still like VMWare because I can run it on my laptop and take it with me anywhere. Oracle VM has its place in the server room, but not on the desktop, yet. It can be used by anyone with VMWare Player (www.vmware.com) for free.
The username and password for the machine is : oracle / oraclevms
These are torrents so please continue to seed them after your downloads are complete, this is the only way I’ll be able to afford to keep them online for people. If you are new to torrents check out http://support.bittorrent.com/ there you will find all the info you need, or just ask one of your pirate friends and I’m sure they can help you out. Admittedly the VM isn’t as nicely put together or as small as I normally do, but due to the circumstances I hope people can understand. I may be offline for a few days, but enjoy the download. This is my trial run for the bigger Oracle/VMware torrent site I hope to have together soon. Thanks to everyone helping with it, we’ll be launched shortly.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget to “Click It” below: 😉
I like to think of myself as a pretty good follower of the Oracle news world, I spend at least an hour a day going through blogs, tweets, google alerts, etc. to make sure I’ve got a finger on the pulse of everything going on at Oracle. Honestly, its never enough, and for the many Oracle customers who’s job isn’t to keep up with every piece of Oracle technology its a confusing world right now.
Every other week we are seeing a new acquisition, new great code examples, etc. and there is no time to keep up with it. Also, its hard to find the best content through all the different sources. I’ve been using sites like Digg and Reddit to keep up with non-Oracle news. While Oracle is huge there is no way Digg would ever create an Oracle category, so I began my search to create my own Digg clone for the Oracle community. Luckily someone already had the same type of idea and created the open source software package, Pligg. All I had to do now was come up with a new design, deploy the site and tweak some of the settings.
So without further ado here it is http://www.ora-click.com the Digg clone for Oracle news. Feel free to join the site, submit some stories and contribute some comments. Right now I’ve got it set so that it takes three “Clicks” for it to appear as Popular News, obviously over time as more stories are submitted we’ll have to bump it up, but I think three is a great start.
If you’re looking to submit your own news all you have to do is log in and go to http://www.ora-click.com/submit.php put in your URL, story title and description. If you’re looking to embed the Ora-Click buttons in your own site I’ve created two sets of buttons to add to your posts.
The small button:
which can be added with the code:
<script src="http://www.ora-click.com/clickit/button-small.php" type="text/javascript"></script>
And the large button:
which can be added with the code
<script src="http://www.ora-click.com/clickit/button.php" type="text/javascript"></script>
It’s that simple, feel free to Click this story and try it out. The site has full RSS feeds for the entire site and also the categories individually. If you have any questions or comments please let me know either through comments here or via email at matt@matttopper.com.
Have fun and enjoy, for those that have asked the virtual machines site isn’t dead, I’ve just been working a million hours and haven’t had time to bring it up to my standards. Look for me to launch a new VM tomorrow on this site as a trial run for it.
I’ve always been intrigued by all the Oracle BI user groups out there, IOUG vs ODTUG vs OAUG. All of them have great leadership but none of them have great participation from the members. Over the years in working with all of them I’ve noticed that there aren’t many differentiators between them. An interesting questions popped up on Mix the other day wanting to merge all the BI related SIGs. Personally, I think its a great idea, but I know there are a lot of opinions out there on it. So lets hear it, make your voice heard in the mix discussion.
https://mix.oracle.com/ideas/13754-merge-all-bi-related-sigs
We’re all here for the same reason, trying to bring great BI to the world (sounds like a great campaign slogan).
Let the barrage of OpenWorld begin. Between two internal preparation meeting tomorrow, finalizing my slides tonight, and other various activities getting ready, the Oracle World barrage has begun. I’m sure many people have seen that I’m speaking this year, and for my first year presenting I’m going to be pretty busy. I have 4 official presentations and I’m hoping to get a fifth with the Unconference event going on. I’m going to try and spend a good chunk of my time in sessions. This is a really exciting year with all the 11g Application Server things being demoed and I can finally start talking about all the cool stuff I’ve been building in the beta period. If you want to meet up give me a ring during the week, my cell number is over in the right or feel free to come and heckle me at one of my sessions.
Session Title | Speaker(s) | Date/Time | Venue/Room | |
IOUG MiddleWare SIG Meeting: Is that really you? Prove it! | Matt Topper, IT ConvergenceDan Norris, Piocon |
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Moscone West 2005L2 |
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IOUG Enterprise Best Practices SIG: Oracle Databse 11g Beta Testing Panel | Matt Topper, IT Convergence And Others |
|
Moscone West 2004L2 |
|
IOUG: Oracle Identity Management–The Total Identity Solution | Matt Topper, IT Convergence |
|
Moscone West 3006L3 |
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IOUG: Demystifying Oracle Fusion Middleware | Matt Topper, IT Convergence |
|
Hilton Yosemite Room C |
I’m also planning on attending the Ace Dinner, AppsLab Get Meetup, and Oracle Blogger Meetup. I’m hoping to chronicle the debauchery of the week via all my feeds, here, on twitter, and through flickr. I can’t wait to see everyone there!
As many of you know, I’m a car guy just as much as I am a technology guy. Back in 98 I had a full pc in my car playing Mp3s with a 20×2 LCD touch screen and I’ve already proven I ran replace my keys with RFID, so needless to say I love the convergence of technology and automobiles. But this one actually scares me. This week OnStar (the GM in vehicle cell service) announced that they’ve paired with law enforcement to slow down your vehicle if it’s stolen or involved in a high speed chase.
http://jalopnik.com/cars/gadgets/onstar-unveils-new-stolen-vehicle-slowdown-system-308640.php
While initially it sounds cool and helps to ensure your car doesn’t end up upside down or in a guard rail during a chase, what worries me is the system itself. Every OnStar vehicle is essentially equipped with a cell phone that has access to the onboard ECM, PCM, etc. The last gen GM vehicles were supposed to be highly secured so that no one except GM could tune them. Well the codes were cracked within a couple months and the aftermarket tuners are off and running. I can just envision this system being cracked and having thousands of GM vehicles disabled on our freeways during rush hour. I’m sure OnStar has spent millions on their design to make sure this doesn’t happen, but as we know, don’t tell a geek he can’t do something because he’ll throw your millions in code out the window with a simple embarrassing back door.
If anyone at GM is listening I’d be more than happy spending a weekend looking through the code making sure there aren’t any issues 😉
A little while ago (ok about 2 weeks) Twitter released a new feature that lets you track “concepts.” The idea is that you can track anytime anyone, not just the people you follow, mentions a word or series of words. That way if you want to see anytime anyone posts something with the word “Oracle” in it or “Matt Topper” you will immediately get an update. While that’s cool, what more interests me is the model they are implementing it with. I’d really like to see the event model and code they are using to filter every post that is made. Holy overhead batman!! Anyways, if you want to start tracking stuff, all you need to do is text your Twitter number with the message “Track <topic here>” i.e. “Track Oracle”. You can see their blog post here: http://twitter.com/blog/2007/09/tracking-twitter.html and if you want to track me I’m over there at http://twitter.com/topperge
OK, back to my install fest weekend. (and playing with RFID on the side)
Well, I spent a good amount of time last night installing and configuring the OAAM software, getting it up and running, configuring the data sources, etc. and came to the point where you have log in. Hmm…well…the docs don’t have a default user name and password to use after the install. So being Oracle we all know where the default user name is at least stored, in the database somewhere right? Wrong, all the user tables were empty for the product. So at this point I’m stuck, I’ve got an SR open, but being such a new product I doubt that will get me far. I’ve also got a couple emails into people I know internally at Oracle so hopefully Monday I’ll get some updates. In the meantime I’m going to work on some slides for my upcoming Oracle World presentations and finish up some virtual machines and get them uploaded to the OracleVMs.com site. S3 has turned out to be a pain to get everything working, but I’m close, hopefully I’ll have a release by the end of the weekend.
Lets start with a little overview of the OAAM Architecture. The software is made up of two components:
- OASA – Oracle Adaptive Strong Authenticator
- OARM – Oracle Adaptive Risk Manager
The OASA component is provides numerous means to protect from phishing, pharming, trojan, and keylogging attacks. The different authentication options are interesting and well designed to protect an organization. The OARM component tracks user usage patterns to help prevent fraud detection. It uses such things as your user name, known computer attributes, known locations you access the system from, etc. to build a comprehensive profile about you. It also allows organizations to monitor in real time what users are accessing their systems and either automatically or manually (through an operator) force a user to perform a secondary level of authentication to prove they are the actual person at the computer. The Risk Manager creates a virtual fingerprint of your users through a combination of IP addresses, geo location, city, state, country information, connection type, connection speed, routes, isp flag, ASN, carrier, top level domain, registering organization, hostnames, routers, and how quickly you navigate pages. You never realized there was so much stuff people could track you by and you don’t really have an option of controlling it.
OAAM is deployed just like any standard J2EE application. It’s packaged as a set of jar files, some static images, and database scripts with property files to link it all together. Nothing here that I haven’t done a million times before. So lets start at the bottom and work our way up. I started with a standard Oracle 10.1.4 OID /SSO deployment and 10.1.3 OC4J/OHS install. So onto the database.
The database much be of version 9.2.0.4 or higher, honestly, if you’re deploying a new software architecture and still using 9.2.0.4 database to store your data give me a call and I’d love to discuss the business reasons for sticking with that. Lucky for me, the basic OID install uses a 10.1.0.5 database so I’m ready.
The first step is to validate the database parameters so that they match the minimum requirements for the install. We first must get access to the pile so we can change it into an spfile to open the database. So first we log into the database as sys.
After we log into the database, create a pfile from the database parameters, after the pfile is created you need to then edit the init<sid>.ora file you’ve created. To do this we set our ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_SID, and PATH.
$> export ORACLE_HOME=/software/oracle/oaam_oid_1014
$> export ORACLE_SID=oaamoid
$> export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH
$> sqlplus /nolog
sql> connect /as sysdba
sql> create pfile = ‘initoaamoid.ora’ from spfile;
sql> quit;
$> vi $ORACLE_HOME/dbs/initoaamoid.ora
Within the pfile you need to set the minimums for the following settings:
*.db_writer_processes=4
*.fast_start_mttr_target=300
*._hash_join_enabled=TRUE
*.open_cursors=2000
*.pga_aggregate_target=512M
*.processes=500
*.query_rewrite_enabled=’FALSE’
*.sessions=500
*.shared_pool_size=500M
*.star_transformation_enabled=’FALSE’
*.timed_statistics=TRUE
*.undo_management=’AUTO’
*.undo_retention=’3600′
*.session_cached_cursors=500
*.commit_write=’BATCH,NOWAIT’
One thing to note, commit_write is not a 10g R1 parameter, it was introduced in 10gR2, so the instructions are a bit off, but not hard to get around, just don’t put it in the end of your pfile. Write out your pfile to the OS and finally we log back into the database, create the spfile from the pfile and start the database.
$> sqlplus /nolog
sql> connect /as sysdba
sql> create spfile = ‘spfileoaamoid.ora’ from pfile;
sql> startup
sql> quit
Once the database is started we then have to load all of the data that allows the components to run. To do this we log back into the database and then execute the db_setup.sql script.
$> sqlplus system/<oraclevms>
sql> @/software/source/oracle/AdaptiveAccessManager10g/oracle_fa_database/db_setup.sql;
The script asks you to enter the location where you want to put the two new tablespaces the application creates, the name of the user you want to use, and the password, then halfway through the script it asks you the name of your temp tablespace (TEMP). Once the script started executing it creates the actual tablespaces, database user, database objects, loads the initial data, and then the location database (for the ip address locations).
Alright, that was stupid simple, the database is done, stay tuned for the software deployment. I apologize for no pictures on this one, I was using a different machine than the one I normally do and my copy of SnagIt was setup to only snap one screen shot and overwrite it each time. I promise the rest of the install log will have pictures to go along. Thats all for now, check back in a few hours (maybe 24) for the java application deployment instructions.