Category: Windows

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!

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.

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 | 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 ;)

Oracle VirtualBox 7 | Windows guests auto-resize guest display

On By windows7bugsIn Oracle VirtualBox, Windows 10, Windows 11Leave a comment

Host: Windows 11, 22H2, VirtualBox 7.0.4

I have one Windows 10 guest from last many years, upgraded through VirtualBox versions 5, 6. Recently I upgraded VirtualBox to 7. While Windows XP & Oracle Linux guests automatically resized the display on host, Windows 10 guest was adamant. Uninstalling and installing the guest addons didn’t help.

After scavenging through few posts over VirtualBox forums, came across one of them discussing about fixing the resizing issue by choosing “VBoxVGA”, though it was not supported. I decided to give it a try and Windows 10 guest resized the display when I toggled the “Auto-Resize Guest Display” from the view menu.

Then I shutdown the guest, changed the Display back to “VBoxSVGA” & the guest allowed me to resize the display using View menu & subsequent restarts were resizing the guest display as expected. However, there were times when I had to manually adjust the display size. Hope Oracle fixes this issue in coming releases.

Windows Mobile hotspot | Connected without internet

On By windows7bugsIn Networking, Windows, Windows 11Leave a comment

Update: 7th December 2022

Today I managed to narrow down the issues to Intel driver specific. AX201 Wi-Fi module driver 22.160 and above breaks the mobile hotspot on both Windows 10 & Windows 11. The only possible solution is to rollback to driver version 22.150.x.x & stay there until Intel identifies and fixes this issue. I have opened a thread with Intel and the representative is investigating this issue. If you are interested, follow the thread here

We’ve poor cellular coverage by the datacenter area from the service provider & most of the times I use my work laptop as Mobile hotspot & it did work. Well, minimum until recent days.

I started seeing my mobile phone showing “Connected without internet” once in few minutes times & I had to reconnect which was a recent development. Unfortunately, I couldn’t land upon any relevant solutions after spending almost two working days searching for solutions & executing my own logic with resetting network/Winsock etcetera.

As I use Samsung Galaxy A71 5G Android phone, I thought of giving another attempt by searching for “Galaxy a71 5g connected without internet” & one of the first search results was:

Samsung Galaxy Phones “Connected without Internet”

Here, the vlogger talks about “Randomized MAC” Galaxy phones use when connecting to Wi-Fi networks. Although the vlogger suggests Static IP address & other changes to resolve this issue, I only changed the connection property from “Random MAC” to “Phone MAC” & days long frustrations were over.

I wanted to figure out why all of a sudden this issue started. I remember using the Mobile Hotspot without any issues, had a PowerShell script to start the mobile hotspot startup automatically whenever I am connected to work network for months & couldn’t just give up because I found a solution. Hence, I continued to find more answers.

There were more videos discussing the same issue about Samsung Galaxy phones & subsequently I landed on a Samsung community discussion here

My mobile is paired over Bluetooth to my laptop & it connects every time laptop restarts. One of the initial settings I checked was to ensure Mobile Hotspot was not setup for 2.4GHz, that causes issues for Bluetooth which uses 2.4GHz by default.

In my case, at work I am not connected to Wi-Fi networks & mobile hotspot is configured to share internet from my domain network connection. By default, as the 5GHz is not consumed by Wi-Fi connections, mobile hotspot utilizes that frequency and leaves a notification, asking to switch the frequency if devices fail to connect.

Hence, it could be one of the many elements as discussed in the Samsung community thread. All you need is to try and find out one that suits your situation. Regardless, if it is a Samsung Galaxy phone, the first solution you could try is to setup Phone MAC instead of Randomized MAC for the specific Wi-Fi connection that you have issues with. If that didn’t resolve, try others.

Windows | “ORA-12640-Authentication adapter initialization failed.”

On By windows7bugsIn Oracle database 11g, Oracle Forms, Oracle related, Oracle SQL Developer, WindowsLeave a comment

Recently at a gathering I was asked about my job. I told a group of young chaps that I work with Oracle EBS and my primary role is developing extensions using Oracle Forms & Reports. Interestingly, none of them knew anything about Oracle Forms & Reports.

Couple of days back I installed Oracle 11G R2 database once “again” as I had to open our legacy software for some historical data access. Then I had to develop a report and to my utter surprise, found Oracle 10g report developer will not connect to 11G database, generating the following errors:

REP-0501: Unable to connect to the specified database.
ORA-12640: Authentication adapter initialization failed

I hurried to check the database sqlnet.ora file and found the authentication set as NTS (Windows default for Oracle products) & interestingly Developer 6i products were connecting to the database without any issues. This helped me to confirm that issues were from Developer 10g side & I changed the sqlnet.ora settings for the Developer 10g Suite.

from NTS to NONE did the trick.

I don’t know how my people are ever going to land on this page! Trust me, I haven’t seen an interesting question about Oracle Forms/Reports in any of the Oracle support forums from last many years. I will be pretty sad to see such a wonderful product that was built for developing Business applications on the go being ignored for some crappy browser based gimmicks.

Happy Diwali guys 🙏

Windows 11 | File Explorer not responding

On By windows7bugsIn Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11Leave a comment

Last couple of years, I stopped evaluating new Windows OS, as they were shipped with so many bugs and updates breaking them further. I felt reporting the bugs didn’t make anything better & few of the folks from Microsoft on Twitter are just lame like their OS. Always finding excuses for a broken OS.

Well, regardless, I always applied the updates, always fixed the issues and continued working on my projects, which are Oracle development (mostly). Like usual, I’ve downloaded the Windows11 22H2 the very first day it was released and upgraded my work laptop. Basically the OS is once again filled with many bugs, one of the notorious being the large file copying lag issues, that is openly acknowledged by Microsoft.

Well I was stuck by an undocumented issue ;) Whenever I tried to open File Explorer, it took many minutes before it was ready to interact with. None of the searches landed me on a proper solution & I just wasted hours tweaking the OS following tips to parameterize the OS for better performance. Then I was expected to copy a large SQL output for our sales manager and I had a shortcut for a folder in his computer on my desktop. I couldn’t open this folder this time & I couldn’t find his laptop’s hostname in the DNS. As the folder was mapped using the hostname, every time I tried to access the folder, gave me the same network path not found error. It took the same amount of time file explorer tried to open & I could make a guess towards what was going wrong with the file explorer.

I remembered this particular folder always listed under the quick access area of the File explorer & I removed it from the quick access area once after the File Explorer was ready next time. File Explorer started opening as snappier as possible then onwards.

Now, this looks like another problem from Microsoft’s latest release that attempts to connect to all the items listed under quick access, ie, like connecting the network folders & failing to establish a connection, throws the exception “File explorer not responding” and taking minutes until the attempts are aborted.

I’ve many folders pinned to quick access area, as a developer I work with multiple projects and this saves loads of time for me. Windows 10, 11 keep tabs on regularly accessed items and pin them to quick access area, a default behavior of the OS. This might create certain unexpected situations like the one I described above. I will not say this feature is useless, but sometimes a user who is not that tech savvy may never realize what is going on here. If I were the File explorer designer/developer I will definitely make sure to code the piece in a way that Explorer would try to connect to network folders only when the user tries to open the folder.

Said, if you are having the same issues with File Explorer taking too much time to open, please check whether any network folders are listed under Quick Access area. If yes, remove them. Unless you are a die hard of fan of automatically pinning items in the Quick Access area, disable the automatic pinning.

This could OS automatically pinning items to your Quick access area & avoid the issue I were discussing.