Oracle Application R12(12.0.x) | JRE | UNKNOWN Publisher

Hi guys

This time I am going to post a solution towards one of the nagging annoyances with Oracle application R12 (12.0.6 in our specific case) & JRE securities those were implemented by JRE 7 (1.7.x)

Our instance was upgraded to use JRE 6 almost 5 years back during 12.0.4 to 12.0.6 upgrade and ever since there were dozens of JRE updates & the current JRE 1.8.0_161 (AS on 19th January 2018) & with each update, whatever the runtime parameters we add specifically for Oracle Application used to get removed, forcing us to renter it for each user.

I’ve been searching for a proper solution, not only towards the runtime parameter fix, for the security prompts those started annoying our end users whenever they tried to launch the forms, once after we forcefully updated many users who were sticking to 1.6 JRE

So after referring many documents, using some of the past experiences dealing with security certificates, I believe, have figured out how to get rid of those annoyances, minimum for a while.

Solution 1

Runtime parameters being removed after each JRE update

jre

Add a new environment JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS with a value -Djava.vendor=”Sun Microsystems Inc.”

You may add it under your specific user or system wide, which I usually prefer so that I don’t have to worry about the next user who will be using the same system (for some reasons)

ENV

Solution 2

Addressing JAVA security prompts

Trying to open the forms with latest JRE without adding exceptions will produce the following JAVA security error

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Now we need to add the application URL with complete port details to the security tab of JRE

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Now, we will be presented with the “toughest” situation to resolve, which will be explained later.

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Clicking the More Information, JAVA presents more details about the digital certificate issues, stating the publisher of the digital certificate as UNKNOWN, hence this warning appears for the end user each time whenever the user tries to open a Forms based module.

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You may require Domain Administrator/Administrator privileges to continue the below fixes

1st we have to retrieve the certificate from Oracle application server. Login as application manager user to LINUX environment (We’re setting up the entire stuffs for R12 application that is running on 64Bit Linux)

download $APPL_TOP/admin/appltop.cer file to local computer (If your implementation team has cloned the instances across, the appltop.cer will remain the same across different servers, so the single certificate integration with the user computer should deal with all different instances of the Oracle application (Test, Development & Production)

Once the certificate is downloaded or copied to the local computer, you need to install it. We’ll install the certificate twice, in two different locations.

Follow the images below for more details

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We will install the certificate for the “Local Machine”, so that all users using the same computer will get benefitted

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For the 1st instance, We MUST install this certificate to “Trusted Root Certification Authorities” Container.

For 78

 

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Once the certificate is imported, We should install the certificate once again, Select “Local System” and follow the prompts. We don’t have to specify the container this time.

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Now, trying to open a forms based module will present you another warning

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Checking “Do not show this again for apps from the publisher and location above” will suppress this dialog until the certificate remains the same for the application server.

Hope this helps few out there!

regards,

rajesh

 

 

ORA-00837: Specified value of MEMORY_TARGET greater than MEMORY_MAX_TARGET

Hi guys

Recently I was trying to understand the AUTOMATIC MEMORY MANAGEMENT feature of 11g onwards database & ended up in a drastic situation where I changed MEMORY_TARGET parameter with a value higher than MEMORY_MAX_TARGET

This has blocked the database from starting & a quick googling brought me to correct solution

As sys, connect to idle database

#sqlplus / as sysdba

SQL> create pfile from spfile;

–Applies to where spfile is used instead of pfile

Edit the pfile & comment/delete the MEMORY_MAX_TARGET parameter, get back to SQL>

SQL>create spfile from pfile;

SQL>startup;

This should resolve the error ORA-00837: Specified value of MEMORY_TARGET greater than MEMORY_MAX_TARGET

Hope this helps few folks out there!

regards,

rajesh

Oracle Application R12 | HTML Page load issues with Internet Explorer 11 | Windows 10

Hi guys

Our Oracle application R12 (12.0.6) instance has JDK 6 environment & We don’t have any plans to migrate to any recent versions of Oracle Application those are supported by later Java environments.

Almost all users those use Oracle applications are using JRE for many other engineering programs (Calculations programs by Vendors) & frequent updates of the JRE happens automatically at the user ends. We have a significant crowd that is still using JRE 1.6_20 as base JRE, who seldom have the following issue(s) discussed below.

Over Windows 10, Internet Explorer 11 fails to load HTML pages properly & many times after the logon to the application, the HTML menu page is loaded in the explorer, leaving a 4-5 white space lines. Refer the image below

halfpage

Basically this issue is observed with boxes those have latest JRE (x86) installed and used with parameter -Djava.vendor=”Sun Microsystems Inc.”

image

Oracle blogs strictly says, Compatibility view for Oracle applications R12 shouldn’t be enabled for Internet Explorer 11. I have tried enabling the Compatibility view for the Oracle applications, without any positive changes.

As a last resort, I reset the Internet Explorer 11

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and after restarting the computer, Oracle Application HTML pages started loading correctly, without leaving white spaces between the IE Window and application top frame.

Hope this helps few folks out there!

rajesh

Windows 10 | WSUS Common Issues

 

Hi guys

After long interval I am doing a Windows OS related topic, for which actually I started this blog. Once after ironing out most of the dreaded issues with Windows 7, I needed to continue blogging & whole attention was shifted to Oracle. Alas! Long years!

WSUS is Microsoft’s solution for enterprises those need to update their Windows boxes without consuming Internet bandwidth. Ie, the updates are downloaded to a centralized repository & clients receive the updates periodically without going to INTERNET. Rest you can read about WSUS from knowledge bases.

Now, we have a problem. We are a super hybrid environment where many machines are still running Windows XP, few laptops held by management running Windows 7, 8.x & rest running Windows 10. We spent months before going online with WSUS. We had lost count of times we made everything from scratches. Thank GOD, today we have a very balanced WSUS environment that does the intended job for us!

Our issues are mostly related to the updates not being installed, failing throughout the attempts & blocking new updates being distributed to the client machine that has an already failed update in the pipe.

The solution to this awkward situation is simple.

  1. As Administrator go to Windows Services, stop and Windows Update service & disable it. By default Windows Update service has a startup mode “Manual”.
  2. Go go C:\Windows (or to the Windows installation folder), located the “SoftwareDistribution” folder & rename/delete it. Don’t worry about the list of updates those appear from your regular “View Installed update history” page. You can still see the list of updates previous installed by going to “Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Programs and Features” & click on  “View installed updates” menu

 

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Once the “SoftwareDistribution” folder is renamed or deleted, get back to the Services MMC & change the start mode back to “Manual” and start the Windows Update Service.

Normal conditions, this should initiate the Windows Update service afresh without any residues from the previous failed attempts & pending updates should get installed successfully.

 

Hope this helps few folks out there!

regards,

rajesh

Weblogic 12c | Admin Server will not start | ORA-28001 | ORA-28000

Hi guys

During 2016-2017 I have done few Weblogic 12c setups for my lab & my setup was accessed for some assignments after a long idle time which was exceeding many months…

I had Windows Services created for both Node Manager & Weblogic Admin servers using NSSM & realized there were something wrong once after many attempts to access the admin console turned out to be futile. So I tried to start the services manually using the scripts & the startWeblogic.cmd terminated with the following error:

Caused by: java.sql.SQLException: ORA-28001: the password has expired

As I always said, I am not a Weblogic guru, just another folk who tries to install and configure new Oracle stuffs. Hence I started searching google using the error that was provided to me during the previous run.

Unfortunately, nothing that could solve my issues were found and I opted to leave it as it is.

All I knew that passwords for few schemas related to Admin Server Repository have been expired. I did a QUERY to find out which schema were having expired passwords and all the repository related schemas were showing expired passwords

  1. DEV_IAU_VIEWER
  2. DEV_IAU_APPEND
  3. DEV_IAU
  4. DEV_OPSS
  5. DEV_STB

These are the schemas created when the repository is created & if the 12c database instance is NOT altered to allowing never expiring passwords, it was obvious the schema passwords expire on the expected dates.

I tried to reset the passwords for all the schema those were having expired password and altered the database instance to allow never expiring passwords. Tried to start the admin server, again ending up with the same error…

Recently I changed my work laptop with a new Dell 5480 & started setting up Weblogic 12c environment & as I had enough experiences with the configurations, was able to complete the entire setup within few hours time. This time I wanted to make sure that, due to password expiry I shouldn’t have the same troubles I had with my previous setup(s). So once everything was setup, I altered the database instance

ALTER PROFILE DEFAULT LIMIT PASSWORD_LIFE_TIME UNLIMITED;

and confirmed that none of repository related schema has an expiry date associated with it.

So, for a lab setup this is more than enough to insure that I will not go through the troubles with expired passwords, causing Weblogic admin server to fail while started. What about a real situation where a DBA is facing this crisis?

So my fresh rounds of google searching started and I landed on a page https://linecode-notes.com/2017/09/08/unable-to-start-the-admin-server-in-forms-12c-due-to-ora-28001/ while using Google search term “oracle weblogic 12c dev_stb password expired”

I had gone through the post minutely and replicated the same scenarios at my end to insure that the instructions provided by the author is generic. Everything worked as expected, most probably because I altered the DEV_OPSS schema password with the same password I initially assigned to it. Hence there were no errors while I tried to start the Admin Server after running the wlst command.

The Only confusing part in the original post should be about the wlst command which says

modifyBootStrapCredential(jpsConfigFile='<Oracle_Home>/user_projects/domains/base_domain/config/fmwconfig/jps-config.xml’,username=’DEV_OPSS’,password=’xxx_n_pass’)

Where <Oracle_Home> should be replaced with actual path. For example, this is what I did. If you have given another name for the domain instead of suggested “base_domain”, replace the base_domain portion with correct name.

(In short, change the path according to your installation parameters!)

modifyBootStrapCredential(jpsConfigFile=’D:/Weblogic/Middleware/Oracle_Home/user_projects/domains/base_domain/config/fmwconfig/jps-config.xml’,username=’DEV_OPSS’,password=’PassWord123′)

Notice the “/” in the path, regardless whether you are on Windows or Unix environments, you must use forward slash “/”

& Most important, do not forget to alter the user with the new password

ALTER USER DEV_OPSS IDENTIFIED BY PassWord123;

Follow rest of the instructions available with the original post. The same author has another post dealing with ORA-28000 (Account locked) for Weblogic as well.

So guys, I hope, for a beginner with Weblogic like me, this is a tremendous information that could save another fresh install and configurations!

Hope this post helps few out there!

regards,

rajesh