Author: windows7bugs

Oracle certified developer with more than ten years of experiences with Windows based domains and client operating systems.

Oracle EBS R12 Vision Instance

On By windows7bugsIn NOT a DBA, Oracle Applications(R12)Leave a comment

Did you ever wish for having your own copy of Oracle EBS R12? Well, Oracle provides a copy that is all yours called VISION instance. The below post is one of the best I came across, explaining how to setup your own VISION instance on Oracle VirtualBox

Get your own Oracle EBS R12.2 Instance On VirtualBox

I hope, it was an easy ride. Oracle’s virtual appliance is perfectly sized for moderate hardware, without GUI out of the box. We’ll see how to install GUI, configure the appliance for network access etcetera in this post.

Basically you get Oracle Linux 7.9 OS, EBS R12 12.2.10 with Oracle database 19.9 in this appliance. You must update the OS to latest before installing GUI. So, let us setup the environment for the update now.

Stop the running application and database instances.

su - oracle
cd /u01/install/APPS/scripts
./stopapps.sh
./stopdb.sh

Oracle has the appliance set to start the database and application instances automatically during every reboot. I strongly suggest you to disable the automatic start of these instances. Oracle starts “ebscdb” and “apps” services every time when the box restarts. We can disable these services using chkconfig command

chkconfig apps off
chkconfig ebscdb off

That’s it. Now, when you restart the box, Oracle services will not start automatically.

Shutdown the server. Change the network configuration for the sever like seen in the below image.

This means, your server will start sharing the host’s active connection(s). If your host machine has an active internet connection, your EBS server will able to access internet this way from it’s environment.

Start the EBS server and complete the OS update. This should be around 2.2GB total downloads and minimum 30-40 minutes, depending upon the hardware resources you have allocated for the virtual machine.

Once the box is update, proceed with “Server with GUI” group installation.

yum groupinstall "Server with GUI"

Restart the server after GUI installed. You can temporarily switch to graphical run level by issuing the command

systemctl isolate graphical.target

and to make the graphical interface as default, issue the below command as root

systemctl set-default graphical.target

Please note, your box doesn’t have VirtualBox extensions yet, which is a MUST for proper mouse integration and more. Prior installing the VirtualBox extensions, make sure to install kernel devel package. Issue the following command

yum install kernel-uek-devel

Additionally install the packages gcc, make & perl (pre-installed usually)

yum install gcc make perl -y

Reboot the server & install the VirtualBox extensions.

If you remember, we changed the network settings earlier for the update & if you try to start the database and application, this may not work. Depending upon how you want to access the VISION instance, you have to configure additional networking now. I suggest to leave the NAT configuration as it is and to configure an additional Network adapter for the intended connectivity.

For example, if you want to share the VISION instance with your teammates within a Class C network, do the following.

Use “Bridged Adapter” & select the adaptor that is connected to the network under “Name”. Recent computers have multiple network and WiFi adapters & selecting the correct adapter is very important for client connectivity. Make sure to setup “Promiscous Mode” to “Allow All”.

Find one free IP address and set up the same for your EBS VISION box. You will have to setup this information at multiple places.

For example, change the hosts file (most important)

Network settings. My box have NAT as first Network Adapter and Host Only network as 2nd Network Adapter. Hence my configurations are like below

For the NAT (Connection #1) I have the following setup

and for the Host Only network (Connection #2)

By having the NAT as first adapter, my box is able to connect to internet, shared from the host and my host can access the EBS instance from the virtual machine using the host only network.

That’s all folks.

Install Oracle Forms & Reports 12.2.1.19 on Windows

On By windows7bugsIn NOT a DBA, Oracle Forms, Weblogic, Windows 10, Windows 11Leave a comment

No post should look good, started with a statement asking the visitor to move on because “There is nothing much to see here”. Trust me, if you already referred my previous post(s) for Oracle Forms & Reports 12.2.1.4, then there is nothing new I have for you in this post. As I don’t have much to offer other than what I have already did through my previous post, let us see how we can insure your fresh attempt to get this whole complex stack installed & configured successfully on your computer.

Are you excited? Don’t be. Oracle has released the much waited Windows version for their Oracle Forms & Reports couple of days back and I must say, I was super excited based on the promises given about the IDE improvements. For improvements what I could see what line numbers inside PL/SQL editor.

Software Requirements

Side note before anything else. Please note, you must install software from the same architecture. Said, if you install JDK 32-Bit and expect your 64-Bit Weblogic to work properly, that is not going to happen. Hence insure all the software you download and install belong to the same architecture.

Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable packages (Specific to Weblogic 12.2)

and for Oracle Forms 12.2.1.19, you have to install Visual Studio 2017 VC++ compoments.

Oracle JDK

Weblogic Server Software

Oracle Forms & Reports 12.2.1.19

Before you start the installation, let’s do a checklist

  • Is your Windows machine updated with latest patches for OS and .Net?
  • Do you have a static IP address for your computer/laptop?
  • What is the name of your computer? does it looks like some random letters?
  • Have your read the installation document? :) nobody does it right?

Legal, cracked, pirated… OS comes in different flavors & nothing can stop it. However, keeping your box up to date is your responsibility. Oracle is a very complex technology, that depends upon many OS elements. A broken box will not get you anywhere.

Static IP address is 2nd most important element when you are installing a server software, that is WebLogic in our case. As this server has to be identified and reached by clients, a fixed IP address is a must, however not always possible when a user has limited infrastructure. Microsoft has provided “Microsoft Loopback” interface for such requirements. Please Google and find more about setting it up, if you are one of those users. Microsoft Loopback helps you to setup a static IP address, please note other computers in your network cannot reach your computer using this IP address or setup!

Name of your computer or HOST name. Much of the Computer/Laptop that you buy with Windows preinstalled come with some whacky names. You should change such names to something more meaningful like “JOHN-PC”,”XYZ” etecetra.

I didn’t either read installation manuals until recent times. I realized that, I could avoid hours or sometimes days long Googling merely by reading the instruction manuals.

Once you are done with Microsoft Visual Studio C++ redistributable package(s) installations, we can proceed. Please follow the below post that should take you through installation and setting up a classic weblogic domain, report server instance etc. I hope you will have least issues installating and configuring Oracle Forms & Reports following my post 🙏(Don’t get discouraged by the title of the referred post, as I stated in the beginning, there is nothing new HERE!). The one thing I want to warn you about the time that your computer might take to bring up the UI for the Oracle Forms & Reports installer. This could be nothing less that 7-8 minutes, much more depending upon your hardware resources.

Install Oracle forms & reports 12.2.1.4 with Weblogic 12c 12.2.1.4

All the best and if you are still stuck, do let me through comments!

Deprecated: The PSR-0 Requests_… class names in the Request library are deprecated

On By windows7bugsIn wordpressLeave a comment

Came across this error after WordPress update? Well, the first time I dealt with one of same nature was when we upgraded our business WordPress to latest version. I have posted about it here & strangely, that is the single post of mine ever got more than couple of likes :)

We are using Elementor and, the stack was the main culprit that was generating maximum errors against the outdated PHP. Having both PHP and Elementor upgraded fixed our issues last time & I didn’t expect anything different this time either.

This time, as soon as I came across the errors once after WordPress upgrade, I asked our hosting partner to upgrade PHP (7.4 => 8.x) for WordPress 6.2.2 and updated Elementor afterwards. That has taken care of the annoying “Deprecated” error messages those were appearing in the admin console (mostly). Please note, while Elementor could be the primary culprit, any other plugin that makes the function calls listed could be the reason for these errors. Update each one of them and see whether the issues persist.

Oracle workflow builder can’t load (or register) custom control wfnvg20.ocx

On By windows7bugsIn Oracle Applications(R12), Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11Leave a comment

Oracle workflow developer for Oracle Applications (EBS) R12 version 2.6.3.x has total 33k downloads. That gives us an idea how scarcely this software is used. Oracle sucks at one place the most, that is fixing their legacy software for new operating systems. For example, Oracle EBS R12 release 12.2 is expected to be supported until 2031, while the development tools for the same were supported till Windows XP OS. Then once in a while they boast about releasing another version of legacy tool, expected to work on later operating systems.

Oracle Workflow builder is not different. Their documentation misses one of the vital point about why one should install the software in a brand new Oracle home! Yes, if you have multiple Oracle products already installed on your computer, Workflow builder installer will pickup the first Oracle home it could read from the Windows registry and default it for the installation, which is the core of all problems you will face while & after the installation.

So, let us do a proper installation of Oracle workflow builder 2.6.3 this time.

Download the installer, which might need a valid Oracle support (Please note, this particular post might only satisfy this particular version of Oracle workflow builder). Extract the archive, go to Disk1 folder and change the property of Setup.exe as seen in the below image.

Setup the compatibility and Running this program as administrator are mandatory for a successful installation.

Now, before starting the software installation, take a backup of your PATH environment variable. Please read my other post explaining how to make a backup for the PATH and later restoring it after the Workflow builder installation.

This is not mandatory, however advisable based on the number of software that you have already installed on your computer.

Once the setup starts make sure you will setup a fresh home for “Workflow builder”

If you made a correct decision for a fresh home, then installation must complete without issues. Please check the below images for additional details. If you try to install the workflow builder in one of the existing Oracle homes, you will comes across installation error(s)

If you ignored the errors and continued with the installation, you will not be presented with net configuration wizard or other post installation steps & you will not able to start Workflow builder, throwing a run-time error.

Leave the prompts to their defaults unless necessary.

At the last phase of the installation, Net configuration assistant starts.

Well, there is no guarantee that the network configuration setup will complete successfully. My development machine has many Oracle products installed and has multiple JAVA runtimes, I think that should be one of the reasons why the configuration tool always failed to complete the setup successfully. Your case may differ.

Please note, you can Oracle XML Gateway Message Designer is also a part of the installation package, you can proceed to install the product if you want at this stage.

Once the installation(s) over, open Oracle Workflow Builder as administrator always, without which the software cannot read Windows Registry keys.

That’s all. Please note, you are installing a software that was made for Windows XP and hardly received much love from Oracle afterwards. Oracle is keeping it only to support legacy software like Oracle E-Business Suite, which Oracle dearly wants to the pull the plugs off, so that they could force the half cooked cloud based Fusion software & squeeze the customers further through subscriptions. Hence don’t expect Oracle fixing these installation ever, EVER!

Windows 11 | Snipping tool “Recording stopped”

On By windows7bugsIn Windows, Windows 11Leave a comment

Updated on 4th Feb, 2023

Please note, below workaround is not anymore applicable after latest “updates” from Microsoft.

Quite recently, Microsoft added a “feature” to their snipping (screen capturing) tool that enabled continued screen capturing or we can comfortably call it as “video capturing” of on-screen activities. I use snipping tool almost every day, for blogging, to update peers about progresses and other & was thrilled to have the video capturing capability built into a tool that I am well familiar with. Then,

I couldn’t get it working! the only one time it worked was when I reset the app from settings and then it started showing me the above each and every other time. I tried to see whether I was the ONLY one having this issue & luckily found “another” person was also having the same issue. He/She posted it on Microsoft answers forum and got the standard answer “go and eff yourself”

After resetting the app couple of times and failing to get it do the video recording, I remembered the troubles I had with extended displays. Windows 11 in the beginning days managed extended displays horribly (not completely matured yet) & I soon assumed that the bug that crashes the video recording was related to extended displays. Hence, I disabled the extended display and as on 27th March 2023, this is the only one solution for me to use snipping tool for recording videos.

The below video was recorded using “Snipping tool”

This works only with the default settings for the snipping tool. If you modify any of the settings, this workaround may crash. For example, I had the “Multiple windows” turned on and the tool crashed even after disabling the display projection. Please note, Microsoft will hopefully address this issue soon and this hack/workaround will be insignificant in near future. There are high possibilities that even after following the hack as said here, you will not successfully record video using the tool. Afterall, it is another Microsoft tool.

Hack for a small size USB flash disk

On By windows7bugsIn Gadgets, Hacks for Practical life, HardwareLeave a comment

I’ve one ONKYO entry level AVR HT-S3800 and it has a front USB port, mostly for playing audio files. This port has issues reading USB drives that exceed certain size limits. Say, if you plug a 16GB drive, there are high possibilities that this unit “may not” read it & I came across such a situation recently. To be quite truthful, I hardly ever tested this USB port & while repositioning the unit, I decided to give it a try.

After some deep scavenging I found an APACER Handy Steno, 512MB USB Flash drive from my collection of antiques, that I bought around 2004-2005. My AVR happily started playing from it, while it dissed my 16GB USB stick. So I thought of all possible solutions like ordering a 2GB USB stick online, getting one USB micro sd card reader etc etc.

After couple of days, at work I came up with a vicious idea. Got hold of my 16GB USB stick, removed the volume and created a 2GB volume, formatted with FAT32 and copied my audio files and took it home and connected to the AVR.

My unit started playing from the USB stick happily and no more hours long scanning or dissing the disk! The hack was fooling the unit to “think” the disk has only 2GB storage. The only downside of this hack is losing the balance storage. Who knows, this hack could be applied to other legacy devices as well, especially for car stereo head units that are few years old.

Fix for Windows 10, 11 virtual machine slowness on VirtualBox

On By windows7bugsIn Oracle VirtualBox, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 112 Comments

I’ve been using Oracle VirtualBox for last many years and ever since I moved to Windows 10, experienced some unexplainable stuttering and lags with Windows 10, 11 virtual machines. I think finally I made a breakthrough for myself. I am not sure whether this approach is helpful for everyone as virtual machines behave differently on different hardware setups. I’ve gone through many VirtualBox forum posts discussing issues with same nature, particularly with NVidia graphic chips/cards & all my boxes have NVidia graphic chips or cards.

My work laptop configuration.

and has one NVMe ssd for the OS and 2TB SSD for data on which I have all my virtual machines. Regardless, with the amount of hardware resources, my Windows 10 virtual machine stuttered, and the experience was horrible, compared to the Windows XP VM that I had. I never had issues with Linux VMs either. I tried almost every trick in the book and always ended with gaining very little.

Couple of weeks back, for one of the Oracle labs exercises I started the Windows 10 VM and for some unknown reasons found the virtual machine was not automatically resizing display. I managed to fix this problem earlier by changing the graphics controller from VBoxSVGA to VBoxVGA, force auto resize & switching graphics controller back to VBoxSVGA. For that exercise I disabled the 3D acceleration, basically landing on a solution unknowingly. I repeated the same exercise and found my Windows 10 virtual machine snappier than ever! To confirm, I switched back to 3D acceleration & managed to reproduce the same choppy, stuttering experience with the same virtual machine once again.

Let us see what happens with we enable 3D acceleration for the graphics controller.

VirtuaBox allows a maximum of 256MB memory for Video & check the below image to see what happens when we enable 3D acceleration.

half of the video memory is consumed by the 3D acceleration! OS like Windows 10, 11 have pretty heavy graphic elements and obviously the limited video memory makes the OS stuttering and lagging whole the way (or this is what I assume from my experiments).

As I mentioned in the beginning, disabling the 3D acceleration works for me on three different machines & different Windows OS virtual machines. Hope this helps few others out there.

How to hide Powershell background window

On By windows7bugsIn PowerShell, WindowsLeave a comment

I’ve changed from Windows batch files to Powershell for almost every other repeated tasks & one of the scripts that I use to connect to our IKEv2 VPN script has a shortcut on my desktop. This script helps me to connect and disconnect from the VPN network just by double clicking the shortcut. You can checkout the script here

I had multiple iterations for the script and kept on deleting and recreating the shortcut and noticed that a black window started appearing when I executed script from the shortcut.

All I could remember was, not changing any settings for the Powershell & couldn’t find a “solution” (that was mere eyesore to my rigid expectations). Interestingly, my semi desktop/server class box didn’t have this “issue”, whenever I executed the script from the shortcut, all I was provided was the “Connected” or “Disconnected” message boxes.

After sometime, I decided to check the shortcut properties on my desktop & noticed that the “Run” option was selected as “Minimized”

Powershell provides many switches & one of the switches is “WindowStyle” that supports Normal, Minimized, Maximized and Hidden styles for the Window. Well, the style “Minimized” just hid the entire window, including the message popups that had prompts.

Quickly I moved to my laptop and changed the Run to “Minimized” and that was it. No more annoying black window behind my script message boxes! No more script outputs shown on the screen. So, if you reached here seeking a how to hide those annoying black windows, give this a try.

Oracle Application R12 12.2 one user cannot logon

On By windows7bugsIn Linux, Oracle Applications(R12), Oracle relatedLeave a comment

Updated on: 28th Feb 2023

Our previous solution to fix “one user cannot” logon was doomed by additional issues sooner than expected. We had to regenerate the jar files using ADADMIN finally to close the issue.

===

We are using Oracle EBS R12 for last 12 years and recently upgraded to 12.2.10. We hardly had much technical issues with the instance until recent days, then came a real annoyance.

One particular user was unable to logon. Instead of OA_HTML page, he was either getting redirected to logout page or the OA_HTML page keeps on trying to load. One of the workarounds we came across was, resetting his password. Once the password changed, he was taken to setup password page and to regular landing page. Well, this also turned into troublesome as each time his session expired, we were forced to reset his password.

So what went wrong? We had an issue with concurrent manager outputs and logs opening into a blank page recently. This happened after RMAN backup up, that is scheduled and we had to run autoconfig to fix this issue. Although autoconfig fixed that issue, opened issues with user logon, as explained above. We kept on watching the alerts for possible errors and there were none. Anyhow, we decided to do the following as the ONLY one relevant document we were able to find on Oracle support was “Unable To Login With One User On Oracle EBS Application (Doc ID 2480008.1)” and the case described was not our case.

This is what finally worked:

  • Cleared global cache (didn’t fix issues)
  • Shutdown Apps tier
  • Ran autoconfig on database Tier
  • Ran autoconfig on both Run and Patch file systems
  • Restarted Apps tier and the issues were resolved

We really don’t know what happened after the RMAN & we didn’t update/altered the OS (Oracle Linux 7). Well, things could go south once in a while, after all Oracle EBS is such a huge and complex repository!

Oracle | Single listener for multiple versions of database

On By windows7bugsIn Oracle database 11g, Oracle Database 19c, WindowsLeave a comment

Environment: Windows OS (Windows 11)

Currently I’ve 2 different versions of Oracle database installed & instances running from my development machine. Oracle 11G R2 (11.20.4) and Oracle 19c (19.14) & yes, we are supported by Oracle. I had 11G installed first & later installed 19c for checking out APEX and ORDS.

As 11G listener was running, I didn’t notice anything problematic until, tried to connect as a specific user. I started getting the error that the listener doesn’t know of the service name. 

PS D:\Oracle19c> sqlplus / as sysdba

SQL*Plus: Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production on Thu Jan 12 12:45:30 2023
Version 19.14.0.0.0

Copyright (c) 1982, 2021, Oracle.  All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 19c Enterprise Edition Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production
Version 19.14.0.0.0

SQL> quit
Disconnected from Oracle Database 19c Enterprise Edition Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production
Version 19.14.0.0.0
PS D:\Oracle19c> sqlplus system@SCTCDB

SQL*Plus: Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production on Thu Jan 12 12:45:34 2023
Version 19.14.0.0.0

Copyright (c) 1982, 2021, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Enter password:
ERROR:
ORA-12514: TNS:listener does not currently know of service requested in connect
descriptor


Enter user-name:

I went ahead and using netca registered the 19c service with 11g listener, restarted the listener services and this time instead of complaining about the missing service, connection attempt froze.

After some confusion, I decided to drop the 11g listener services and created a new listener from 19c environment.

Registered both 19c & 11g services using 19c NETCA this time & restarted the listener. I was able to connect to both databases using username/password@servicename syntax this time.

So let us see what went wrong. 11g database was configured for connections from Oracle Developer 6i legacy applications.

This cannot be modified without failing the legacy application. Please refer the below to understand how the authentication works with different versions of databases and what has changed.

Check for the SQLNET.ALLOWED_LOGON_VERSION Parameter Behavior (oracle.com)

As I am not allowed to change 11g environment, the ONLY one way I can use the same listener was to register 11g service with 19c listener. Simple, clean and effective. Hope this helps few out there who is not a certified DBA like me ;)