Rick’s Blog

FYI – The new Daylight Saving Time changes that started in March 2007 will soon be changing back to Standard Time on November 4^th, 2007 .

       Year       DST Begins        DST Ends

1.      2007                     March 11                         November 4
   
2.      2008                     March 9                           November 2
   
3.      2009                     March 8                           November 1
   
4.      2010                     March 14                         November 7
   
5.      2011                     March 13                         November 6
   
6.      2012                     March 11                         November 4
   
7.      2013                     March 10                         November 3
   
8.      2014                     March 9                           November 2
   
9.      2015                     March 8                           November 1

Additionally remember that by the old definition DST ended the last Sunday in October. In 2006 daylight time ended on October 29, 2006. In 2007 however, daylight time would have ended on October 28, 2007. Why do we care? Because any machines or services that did not get the correct DST patches will probably try to change to standard time on the October 28^th date.

So be on the watch-out for oddities on both October 28^th and November 4^th.

Here is a simple way to syncronize schema passwords from one Oracle database to another. On the source database run the following sqlplus command:

SQL> select ‘alter user ‘ || username || ‘ identified by values ”’||  password ||”’;’
from dba_users where username in (‘GMADMIN’,'GM_0′,’GM_0_REPORT’,'GM_0_STATS’);

That will produce the following output which you can run on your new database:
 
‘ALTERUSER’||USERNAME||’IDENTIFIEDBYVALUES”’||PASSWORD||”’;’
——————————————————————————–
alter user GM_0_REPORT identified by values ‘SJINE200223′;
alter user GM_0_STATS identified by values ‘SKDNO9S9S’;
alter user GM_0 identified by values ‘SD8HF872B34′;
alter user GMADMIN identified by values ‘SN828WWHB88′;

In our survey of top call-centers 24-7 INtouch is rated number one.

Give Travis Bailey a call and tell him “Rick sent me”.

Check out their site at here or their blog here.

I ran into this issue on one of our RAC clusters.

The error is:The user “oracle” does not have user equivalence setup on nodes. Please setup the user equivalence before proceeding. PRKC-1044 : Failed to check remote command execution setup for node dbserver-010 using shells /usr/local/bin/ssh and /usr/bin/rsh dbserver-010: Connection refused.

The fix was to ssh to all the names by which the computers were known as (all the interfaces) and answer the ssh question about adding the new identity.

dbserver-010% ssh dbserver-010-vip uname -nThe authenticity of host ‘dbserver-010-vip (10.0.0.53)’ can’t be established.RSA key fingerprint is 57:3b:fd:e7:b8:e8:a2:8a:81:f8:b0:19:fc:68:20:17.Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yesWarning: Permanently added ‘dbserver-010-vip,10.0.0.53′ (RSA) to the list of known hosts.dbserver-010

Then I also had to enable rlogin on all the cluster nodes with the following command:

dbserver-010# svcadm enable svc:/network/login:rlogin

While the above solutions helped the final problem turned out to be the way my VNC server session was rejecting the Xauth and ssh/rsh was sending a warning back to the Oracle check script which verifies ssh/rsh and has nothing to do with X but the Warning is ignorantly treated like an outright failure. From the console this is the output of a simple ssh command:

dbserver-010% ssh dbserver-012
Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.

During installation check, oracle runs following command to check node connectivity:

/usr/local/bin/ssh -o FallBackToRsh=no -o PasswordAuthentication=no -o StrictHostKeyChecking=yes -o NumberOfPasswordPrompts=0 node1.domaina.com /usr/bin/true

Reference Metalink Note:338045.1

As much as I would like to dis-like certain products, I do like to have ability to communicate with people in a way that they can understand the message. For some that includes using MS Office 2007. So here is a link to the compatability download to enable 2007 files to be opened and saved from your current 2005 office installation. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll even get the full upgrade. Perish the thought.

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

Open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.

A great way to increase your productivity is to add more screens to your computer. I currently have two computers with two screens each for a total of four screens. This is nice but I still dream of adding more screens. I was in Best Buy and saw that the 24″ screens are finally in the affordable range (<$500). You may have to add to that the price of an updated video card to drive the display.

If your really ready to do it right then check out this site for more eye-candy digitaltigers.com.

Oracle is putting enough informaiton and management into their Enterprise Manager product that it makes sense for anyone who manages anything more than a trivial site to be able to use and understand it. The grid controlwill be a key technology.

Database resident connection pool will help the scalability of PHP applications by creating a connection pool on the server. This will require a special PHP connection driver which is yet to be released.

Nothing here really on this post since it is just a post for showing how an image can be inserted using the blog software. This is really only a test

Here is the place for some apex examples for tiny pieces of apps

While running dbca I got the following errors:

ORA-00119: Invalid specification for system parameter LOCAL_LISTENER
ORA-00132: Syntax error or unresolved network name LISTENER_<sid>
ORA-1078: Failure in processing system parameters.

There is a metalink note with a nice workaround here Note:433817.1

Here is a free report showing why e-commerce search is important. A nice read from

Download the 37signals E-Commerce Search Report

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is all about connecting services together from the same or different companies. This distinction crosses the boundary of standard enterprise development and brings new capabilities to the programmers to connect with business needs much easier than before. Remember the insanely difficult and expensive Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)?

SOA will change all of that. Start your education here with the SOA Practitioners’ Guide

The people at Active Endpointsare a great place to get started with SOA and BPEL. They have a BPEL for people beta program. Check out comments made about them in this white paper (Return on Investment for Composite Applications and Service Oriented Architectures).

To unsecure the EM agent run the following command:
$EMHOME/bin/emctl unsecure agent
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 10.2.0.1.0.
Copyright (c) 1996, 2005 Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.
Checking Agent for HTTP…   Done.
Agent successfully stopped…   Done.
Unsecuring agent…   Started.
Agent is now unsecured…   Done.
Unsecuring agent…   Ended.
Agent successfully restarted…   Done.

As a user of Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) I know that sometimes the wait for the browser refresh can be tough. One thing the new document suggests is that you can run multiple instances of the OMS on the same host and use a load balancer to spread the requests to the multiple instances. We have a Sun t2000 which is great for multi-threaded applications. We will use this to run our multi-instance OMS and see if we can kick up the performance a little. You can find the white paper Configuring
Enterprise Manager for High Availability.

This is the Dell configurator

Use this tool to guestimate the actual power used by the hardware you order.

I like to see passionate people perform no matter what the venue or outlet of their passionate manifestation is. Passionate dabs, programmers, writers, advertisers, designers or singers, it is all about communicating and connecting your passion to another person or mass populations. dabs express their passion in a artfully crafted and easily maintained schema and well tuned queries. Programmers connect with thousands by designing and coding applications that people want to use. Google or Ameritrade are two examples.

Prince is definitely passionate. He makes no apology for creating and sharing his vision. So when I was in Vegas for a conference I was excited to find club 3121 venue where I could get close to Prince’s live performance. The intensity and showmanship was exciting and helps me to connect with my inner techno-passions. I will be a better visionary, architect, DBA, programmer, communicator and leader because of this experience.

Once you find out how to connect with your own passion your work will become fun, easy, and inspiring. Explore other people who you consider passionate, then study the way they access, use and communicate that passion. Find out what works for you and incorporate those patterns of success into your routine.

Arrived in Vegas. Already seeing and speaking with some attendees. Looking forward to the new announcement from Charles Phillips.

Going to see Prince tonight! Standing room only crowd. Hope it is a high energy passionate performance!!! Ya, could it be anything else?

We made it!! DST is here and we are happy.

Sun Mar 11 01:59:58 EST 2007
Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 EST 2007
Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 EDT 2007
Sun Mar 11 03:00:02 EDT 2007