Month: December 2021

Connecting Oracle Developer 10g to 11G database takes long time

On By windows7bugsIn Oracle Applications (R12.0.4), Oracle database 11g, Oracle Forms, Oracle SQL Developer, Windows 10, Windows 11Leave a comment

We migrated to 11G R2 (11.2.0.4) for our Oracle Applications R12 few years back, yes few years back (2017) & lived with one of the worst experiences…

Connecting Oracle Developer 10g (Forms/Reports) suite to 11G database.

I have scavenged through community articles for long time before giving up. I hardly came across a single fix for the connection time that used to hang up the Developer suite at times…

Today, I decided to find a solution for the nagging SSH connection issues from Windows 11 to our LINUX application servers and realized that we didn’t update the DNS settings for them once after we decommissioned a domain controller. Once the SSH issues were rectified and addressed, my next attempt was to find a solution for “frmcmp_batch” taking long time to start compiling modules & I landed on the below post.

Credit: Oracle Applications DBA: Form Compilation Against a 11g Database Hangs or Takes a Very Long Time [ID 880660.1] (appsjagan.blogspot.com)

As we are already on 11G R2 11.2.0.4, patching was not required. All I needed was to alter the hidden parameter “_FIX_CONTROL” as mentioned in the article.

SQL> ALTER SYSTEM SET "_FIX_CONTROL"='8560951:ON';

(Use scope=spfile to make this change permanent. This will require you to restart the database.)

I opted to go without spfile for testing & as soon as applied, the “frmcmp_batch” started compiling the modules instantly, against the usual delay that ran into many minutes other times.

Out of curiosity, I tried to connect to the database from Developer 10g & the connection was instant! within a fraction of a second.

So DNS being one of the most important elements establishing successful connections, patches and fixes also play crucial role in providing stable connections. Were you stuck with the same issue? give the solution a try and let us know whether it helped you also.

IIS 7.5+ | Windows Authentication

On By windows7bugsIn WindowsLeave a comment

We decided to retire one of our Windows 2008 (32-Bit) servers, hosting multiple classic ASP intranet applications. Our immediate choice was another VM, that runs Windows 2008 R2, 64-Bit OS with IIS 7.5.x as intermediatory until we setup a brand new VM running Windows 2019 & soon realized that we were in tight spot as any attempt to access intranet application(s) from the new host started prompting for authorization for applications that were using “Windows Authentication”. All our application servers are domain members, so are our clients.

We did an apple to apple comparison between servers/IIS setup, visited dozens of threads & yet were unable to fix the “problem”, that was the site/application asking for authentication for a user who is already authenticated by the Active Directory!

Credits:

Although Midas site article Configuring Web Browsers for Active Directory Integration | MIDAS clearly mentioned about adding the website to local intranet zone, we missed it completely!

After referring third link, had the answer to our problem. Actually, if a client wants to negotiate authentication using “Windows Authentication” through a website by passing currently logged in user credentials, that website should be in Local Intranet zone, which was, for us controlled using a Group policy. This is strictly to make sure that user details are not shared with Internet zones, as a security measure.

Once the new site name was added to the zone list and group policies updated, we were able to access the intranet applications without further issues.

Oracle VirtualBox VM to VMWare ESXi 6+

On By windows7bugsIn VMWareLeave a comment

We had couple of hardware failures, forcing us to build virtual machines using Oracle VirtualBox until we rebuilt the hardware. At organization level we have VMware standardized and according to the plans, initiated migrations from VirtualBox couple of days back.

New machines were created from ESXi 7 host, database backups were restored and applications were online & everything looked fine until we couldn’t get hold of a “chap” who provided us a small MS SQL based application that printed some Governmental forms (Arabic). To insure his “software” wouldn’t be pirated, he had password set to the database user account himself & dictated his own terms.

This forced us to think about alternatives and we decided to build another VM using disks from VirtualBox VM, painfully realizing, it was NOT that easy, however pretty doable.

Credits: Migrate VirtualBox to VMware ESXi 6.5 – VIONBLOG

Few points that I want to add here are:

ESXi creates the machine for EFI boot when much of the VMs you create using VirtualBox are using BIOS for firmware. Hence make sure that you will go to VM Options, Boot Options and select Firmware as “BIOS” before booting the VM after attaching the disks converted from VDI to vmdk following instructions from the above provided link.

Convert the VDI disks to fixed size before converting them to vmdk. This insures marginal performance gains, especially when disks are used for databases.

Use Winscp for large file transfers incase if you are using Windows & uploading disks to ESXi environments. Built-in datastore uploads could error out when file sizes are beyond a particular size. We had 2 vmdk files, exceeding 400GB and the 1st file upload stopped responding after 71%. We managed to upload these files (1 after another) in next 50 minutes using Winscp.

Insure your ESXi datastore has enough free storage because you will be converting the uploaded vmdk disks once again to suite the environment. Another suggestion is, do not convert multiple disks at same time. Going one after another insures that you get the maximum resources to convert files.

Above given link mentions about editing vmdk descriptor to change adapter type. In our case, it was not necessary. Adapter type was set “lsilogi” when we checked those files after last level conversions using vmkfstools. However, you must insure the same.