Posts Tagged ‘Vista’

Experiences with Vista and Oracle software (2)

A few months ago I wrote this blog about installing (Oracle) software on my new Vista laptop. I already installed these components several times on Windows XP, so I thought it would be a walk in the park. In the end, it took me a couple of days instead of hours …

There are lots of threads on the OTN forums -like this one- dealing with Vista. It turned out I wasn’t the only one struggling with it.

This blog is about installing Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.1 and patch 10.1.3.3 on Vista. Common errors thrown at me -some gave me nightmares - were:

• OWSM configuration assitant fails.
• Error: Missing ormi[s]://host:port.
• This OC4J is configured to make JMX connections via RMIS and fall back to RMI if the RMIS port is not configured. The RMIS connection on the OC4J instance null on Application Server null is configured but a connection could not be established. The JMX protocol is specified by the oracle.oc4j.jmx.internal.connection.protocol property in opmn.xml.

I did three “batches” of steps to get it running:

• Perform the pre-installation steps as documented in the Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.1 and 10.1.3.3 installation guides. These contain the usual steps like configuring a loopback adapter, not using whitespace characters in directory names, having the right JDK, etc. These guides are bundled with the SOA Suite installation files when downloaded from OTN. Performing these steps is “business as usual”. However, these steps alone didn’t work.
• Perform some steps as documented in Metalink note 444112.1.
• Browse through the OTN forums for the remaining errors and stacktraces.

These last two “batches” consist of the following additional actions:

• Do not use underscores in your computer name. I had an underscore in it -love them since you can’t safely use whitespaces - and I couldn’t run SOA Suite. See this forum post.
• IPV6 is not supported with Vista. There are some compatibility issues between Sun’s JDK and the new IPv6 protocol. I explicitly disabled IPv6 by removing “::1 localhost” from my hosts file, disabling Internet Protocol version 6 (TCP/IPv6) for all my network adapters in the Windows network configuration, and added the following registry value (DWORD type) set to 0xFF:
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SYSTEM, CurrentControlSet, Services, Tcpip6, Parameters, DisabledComponents. This is documented in the Metalink note. You can also add the Java option “-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true” to use IPv4 instead of IPv6.
• Install, start, and stop Oracle SOA Suite as administrator (e.g. right-click and choose “Run as administrator”). Somehow this causes the relative paths in the Start Menu shortcuts to not resolve to the correct locations anymore. I changed these locations to absolute file paths. To do this, edit the [SOA Suite home]/bin/runstartupconsole.bat file and change the line containing “set ORACLE_HOME”.
• Firewalls and virus scanners are great when they are not hogging your system and/or block wanted messages. The latter happened on my laptop. I disabled the pre-installed security software since it blocked certain requests and replies from and to my local Oracle SOA Suite.
• I did an advanced install and used Oracle 10g XE as dehydration store since the pre-installed Oracle Lite database (Oracle SOA Suite basic install) crashed every now and then.

These errors can be really frustrating. Especially when you successfully install the exact same software on another OS within the hour and all your “Linux” and “XP” colleagues have Hello World running on Oracle SOA Suite Hope this helps.

Experiences with Vista and Oracle software

This is a quick overview of my attempts to install and run (Oracle) software on Microsoft Vista. A few months ago I got this new Dell laptop pre-installed with Vista Business. Last couple of years I mostly worked with 2000, XP and Unix/Linux so Vista was getting used to in the beginning; especially the enormous amounts of “Are you sure”, “Do you really want this?”, “You’re not allowed to do this”, etc. pop-ups (even more than XP had). Although I must admit that some of the new UI-stuff is real eye-candy.

Some general (and sometimes really frustrating) issues I ran into when trying to get Vista up and running was the new IPv6 network protocol and updated WPA stuff (my existing router and wifi configuration really had a hard time connecting to my laptop or vice versa – I’m not a network guru, maybe that’s the problem after all , the new user account control (UAC) policy in Vista (I couldn’t stop some Windows services in the beginning even when logged on as admin) and the pre-installed firewall, virus scanner, etc. which made my (finally up-and-running) Internet connection and network adapter crash. So after some reboots and resetting my laptop to factory settings I thought I had the new Vista “under control”.

Time to install some real business software.

Up to now I have the following software up and running (didn’t really test all software extensively yet):

• Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect
• JDK 5 and 6
• Eclipse SDK
• Eclipse WTP
• Oracle BPA Suite
• JDeveloper 10g
• JDeveloper 11g – Technology Preview including SOA Suite and WebCenter
• Oracle XE 10g
• Oracle SQL Developer
• Oracle OC4J 10g

Some tips:

• Don’t use the standard Vista (un)zipper when unzipping software with long directory- and filenames. For example, I couldn’t run Eclipse WTP since the Vista unzipper didn’t extract all the extension files. This can be tricky since some installers won’t even indicate that all files are not properly unzipped. You can start Eclipse WTP, develop some code, but when trying to add a server, there’s nothing there to add?! Use another tool such as 7-Zip.
• Run all installations and configurations as administrator; right-click and choose “Run as administrator”.
• I ran into an error when installing a standalone OC4J. This was caused by compatibility issues between Sun’s JDK and the new IPv6 protocol. Trying to shut down OC4J returns an error indicating “Error: Missing ormi[s]://: “. See this forum post for a solution. I simply added the -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
  parameter to the OC4J startup command in oc4j.cmd.
• Read the installation manual. Ok, I know this sounds a bit daft, but there are numerous forum questions in which it turns out people didn’t configure a loopback adapter, didn’t have the right JDK installed, etc. So after all, it’s really worth reading the manual.
• Make sure the directory structure for your Java and Oracle installations don’t contain whitespaces or symbols such as # or @. I only use letters, digits, dots and underscores. Not all software can handle other characters.

Ok, in the next couple of days/weeks I’m going to (or at least try to install SOA Suite 10g (lot of forum posts on installing this on Vista), Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition and playing around with Coherence.