Frederick Tang Weblog

Continuing on the 2nd part of my loadjava story…

In the project I was working on, we had a development environment, a pre-production environment and the production environment. Dev is for development of course, it was using 9.2.0.8 – which was the version my previous story was based on. The Pre-Prod was actually on 9.2.0.6. Here comes the interesting part…

When I started to test my installation scripts on the Pre-Production database, the loadjava command failed with a JNI panic, rougly similar to this.

$>loadjava -user a_user/a_password@an_instance -verbose AJavaClass.class
JNI panic: JNI received a null array…

A long hard search on Metalink, I found a similar issue was reported (Note:302161.1). “This issue affects 64bit Oracle on Solaris only. The 9.2.0.6 JDBC Patch does not install the 32bit library ‘libocijdbc9.so’ in the $ORACLE_HOME/lib32 directory.”. It claims to have been identified in Bug 4051171 and fixed in Bug 4071941. The same note also gave two workarounds: (1) Install the patch referenced in Bug 4071941; (2) use loadjava -thin …

loadjava -thin didn’t work for me, so I had to apply the patch referenced in Bug 4071941. I did a Metalink search for “Patch Number”, “4071941″, and it came up with the link to download the patch.

Come patch time, opatch failed with this error:

OPatch detects your platform as 453 while this patch xxxxxx supports platforms:

   23 (Solaris Operating System (SPARC 64-bit))

So I applied the workaround as suggested by Note:337288.1.

The workaround and patch executed successfully, and loadjava works again.

Okay, I know rsh and rcp are not very secure, and ssh provides the equivalent with better security, but it’s just not possible with the version of OUI (Oracle Universal Installer) that came with Oracle 9.2.0.1 installation.

An Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) is usually made up of two or more nodes. To begin the setup, the OUI installer is started on one of the nodes, and it will automatically copy the binaries to other nodes in the clustered environment.

In Oracle 9.2.0.1, the OUI uses rsh and rcp. Starting from 9.2.0.5 patchset, the OUI can use ssh and scp. It didn’t work when I tried using the 9.2.0.5 OUI, and point it to the 9.2.0.1 inventory. The previous version of inventory are kept in a .jar file, whereas later version of inventory are kept in .xml file.

This was documented in:

Metalink Note:205499.1: Can ssh/scp be used with OPS/RAC instead of rsh/rcp?.

Oracle9i RAC Setup and Configuration – UNIX Preinstallation Steps [link]

Oracle10g Clusterware and RAC Installation Guide (for Solaris) [link]

I was trying to setup a Oracle9i RAC cluster, and the OUI required rsh and rcp to work (that story later). Both rsh or rcp gave me a “Permission Denied” error, on these two Solaris 10 machines.

My machine names are: psrdb01 and psrdb02. The hostname and IPs are setup correctly in the /etc/hosts file. I used the .rhosts method.

psrdb01$ echo $SHELL      
/usr/bin/ksh

psrdb01$ id
uid=1001(oracle) gid=101(dba)

psrdb01$ more $HOME/.rhosts
psrdb02 oracle
psrdb01 oracle

psrdb02$ id
uid=1001(oracle) gid=101(dba)

psrdb02$ more $HOME/.rhosts
psrdb02 oracle
psrdb01 oracle

psrdb01$ rsh psrdb02 date
permission denied

After a long hard search on the Internet, I found out I had to update /etc/pam.conf, and uncomment (or insert if it’s not there) this line:

rsh auth sufficient pam_rhosts_auth.so.1

Otherwise, the $HOME/.rhosts file is not used by rsh or rcp. Many thanks to Andreas Buschmann, Jeffery Donovan and Peter Benie.

Yesterday I was trying to install some application PL/SQL code onto a production database. The hardware and OS is irrelevant here… The Oracle version running is 9.2.0.8.

I thought all is well, but when I went in to perform the install, this hit me:

%> sqlplus
ld.so.1: sqlplus: fatal: /home/oracle/92/lib/libclntsh.so.9.0: Permission denied
Killed

Why am I denied??

%> id
uid=1063(tiger) gid=1016(tiger)
%> groups tiger
tiger
%> ls -l /u00/home/oracle/92/lib/libclntsh.so.9.0
-rwxr-x—   1 oracle   dba      17416032 Sep 27 03:59 /home/oracle/92/lib/libclntsh.so.9.0

Turns out it is a known Oracle bug after applying the Oracle patch / upgrade: Metalink Note: 334893.1 – After install 9.2.0.7 patchset Sqlplus fails due to permission denied on LibcInstsh.So.9.0.

After applying 9.2.0.7 patchset only users on dba group can see sqlplus. This problem can occur on any platform. Solution is to apply Patch 4533592.

On the same Metalink note, there’s a reference to another Metalink note for 9.2.0.8 – Note 395586.1 – Incorrect Permission On Some Files In 9.2.0.8 $ORACLE_HOME/lib32 After Running changePerm.sh.

Causing much headaches…

I am now a proud owner of the iPod touch - a birthday present from my girlfriend!!

I love my new toy, I haven’t been able to keep my hands off it since Day 1. Of course, you might already have read all about its features, other people’s impression of it, or even seen a real life demo. Though, after playing with it for a week, I would like to blog about what I think about it.

None of these issues are major bad points about the iPod touch, but they are just some of things you might not notice until you have used it for a while.

Good Points (EVERYTHING – but the highlights for me):

1. the Album cover flow – it just makes me want to scroll back and forth all day long. 

2. the automatic tilt/rotate view when I physically rotate the iPod.

3. the touchscreen user interface – it is quite accurate given the width of a finger.

4. the applications – Safari, YouTube, Photo, Video, iTune Store.

5. the Wifi!

6. the screen is very impressive and high resolution – 480-by-320-pixel resolution at 163 pixels per inch. Videos look good on it – try the Starcraft II iPod version trailer!!

7. the clock! it should really be in the list of applications above, but it’s so cool that I should mention it especially. I can keep times of several world cities of my choice, and concurrently, how cool is that? Good for your scheduling of conference calls if people are scattered around the world.

8. the interface is really fast and responsive, unlike some of the mobile phones I used.

9. Support different languages – Big5 characters are displaying fine.

“Other things I noticed”:

1. Battery – the spec says 22 hrs audio playback; 5 hrs video playback. I guess the 22 hrs audio is true if I turned off the screen. If I started playing with album cover flow, change songs/albums… etc. The battery life will be a lot less. For example, I kept the screen on most of the time, and played around with the album cover flow, the battery went down to 20% in about 6-7 hours. At 20%, iPod gave a low battery notification.

2. Wifi – for some reason, the wifi connection wasn’t as fast and stable as I expected, and that’s even placing the iPod next to my wireless router. Can possibly blame the wifi interference, but my laptop or computer has no trouble achieving the full speed of my Internet connection. Maybe it’s just because the iPod is a low-powered device.

3. Touchscreen keyboard – it is nice to use the touchscreen to scroll or drag, but when it comes to typing, I am finding it difficult not to make a typo. It’s very easy to touch the key next to the key you actually want to press. Making a mistake is not so much a problem with normal text fields, but try the masked password field in the Wifi connection, and a 128bit Hex key. I had to do it 5 times before I got it right.

4. Album cover flow – the album images are sharpened when they are brought to the center of the iPod screen. At times, I find the images weren’t sharpened and just remain blur. Just a software refinement I guess.

5. Video – avi or mpg won’t work on the iPod but I guess this is already a known fact. Must use mp4. The Apple website provides some Games or Video trailers in iPod version – they work charmingly, otherwise, you need an mp4/m4v converter.

6. Touchscreen music player – at times, I want to turn down the volume real fast – can’t do that if the iPod screen locks after a max-time of 5 mins (or I can customize it to Never – then the battery will go down even faster). I tried tapping the volume bar real fast once, and accidentally turned the volume to max – hurts the eardrums… duh! (or maybe the pause button is too close to the volume bar in terms of finger width)

7. Albums display – in the normal standup mode, I can scroll the albums list for decide which one I want to play, if I tap on an album once, I see the songs in that album. If I tap the “Albums” icon again, I am brought back to the albums list. The only thing I didn’t like is, I would lose my scroll position unlike what I can get in Internet Explorer’s “Back” button.

8. Finger marks – always use the iPod with clean fingers and clean it regularly to keep it looking as good as new.

All in all, I think it is worth every dollar spent. The iPhone and future iPod Touch can only get better. The size of the screen is not bad for 3G content. One of the things I don’t like about the current 3G phones, is the small screen. I don’t like using a small screen to watch IPTV, browse the web, or using the buttons to control my applications – there’s just too many clicks, layers of menus and it gets too tedious.

Browsing the web on the iPod I felt is actually okay. I am impressed and happy. I can zoom out and zoom in a webpage using my finger gestures.

The only thing to think about is how long will the battery last.