I totally agree that the 10g AS is a lot easier to setup and administrate (and 9i forms compile like a charm.. that is.. on a 9.0.4). apachectl was removed with 10g though. Splitting the application server up into a seperate forms and reports edition was a smart move too. I rarely do a complete install nowadays, just because 9 out of 10 times all that is needed is oc4j for some forms. Also I am mostly working as trouble shooter on IAS, that is.. if I am still doing the tech stuff. This is due to the company I work at, but I can imagine you have simular experiences.

In my humble opinion interesting themes would be:

- SSL / general security on IAS
- log offloading ( I am still working on a tool to store dms statistics in a database so I can finaly create some real reports on performance)
- Webcache is far underrated, it makes life so much easier! This is worth a some credit too.
- OC4J tweaking (some people just don’t understand the meaning of the islands)
- IAS and Headstart. If you had to install it once, you now how much trouble it is (especially on *nix).
- Finaly I would like to see some test results in performance differences on different operating systems (and yes, I am still a linux adept )

As you know I’m no rocket science engineer, but I hope this gives you some pointers for some more case studies.

Cheers,

Jacco

Thank you very much for your appreciation of our blog and our contributions on it )

yes, it happened to us once while installing an iAS9i R2. First we tried to reanimated it with ResyncInstance which didn’t work (= still out of sync). As far as I can remenber the only remedy which actually helped was to deregister the midtier from the infrastructure, reinstall the infrastructure an reregister the midtier to the infrastructure again (which was half a days work).

This is especially tricky when the midtier is using SSL and also an SSO server (which is not in the default position on the Infrastructure machine – recommended by Oracle ).

Be happy that Oracle 10G does not have that problem anymore. Oracle adapted the EM-website and made DCM leading, meaning EM uses the DCM-commands in the background now.
And the Log-viewer of version 10 makes the checkup on the logs much easier too. So, if you can switch to OAS10g.

About apachectl, I’m not quite sure but I thougth that it still exists in 9i but it is not recommended to use.

Any idea what would be an interesting theme to write about next time?

Hope to read from you again,

Karin Kriebisch

My main issue with dcm is the lack of clear error messages as well as a broken interface on top of already existing (and if I might say so: perfectly correct functioning) tools. The more low-level the tool, the better the messages it returns. If you get an error message from dcm, nine out of ten times you need to check 2 more logfiles to find out what is the actual cause of the pin you are sitting on.

My second issue with dcm is the “sync” issue. Have you even been experiencing an infrastructure out of sync because of working with dcm (or even better, because you have hacked your way through configuration files?). I already found applications servers at customers sites that have a wrapper for opmn and dcmctl that makes sure it syncs before the actual action that is asked will be performed. I sure as hell created them for some customers too. Just becuase (especially unix-) administrators are used to hacking in files, in stead of using a rather broken interface called enterprise manager, which has a poor performance and lacks proper (management) information.

So far for my tirade on application servers for today. Karin, keep up the good stuff. I would love to read some more of your thoughts about application servers.