PMT and Websphere 6.1

I did my first install of Websphere 6.1 the other day on HP-UX and ran into a very strange problem. Profiles are now managed through the PMT, the profile management tool. After doing the initial install, I started the PMT through the first steps wizard and the PMT launched, but the screen was blank. I didn't see any buttons or anything to click on, which was odd since the websphere install itself worked fine with my X server (I prefer the free XMING, or you can use Cygwin inside of Windows). Due to security restrictions on the VPN I was connected to, I was unable to try the built in X server on my Macbook Pro, so I was stuck inside of Windows.

I did some googling and found this article on an IBM forum:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=14238812

Apparently this is a known issue and the only X server on Windows that works as of today is Exceed, which of course isn't free. I had to download the trial, install it, and then magically I was able to see the buttons to do a GUI based profile creation. Not cool, and I hope IBM fixes this fairly soon to work with other X servers.

Fixing swlist RPC errors on HP-UX

In your swagentd.log file you may see the following:

ERROR: Invalid protocol sequence specified as part of the
"rpc_binding_info=" configuration option.
ERROR: Terminating prematurely - cannot serve Remote Procedure Call
requests.

Which will cause swlist and swinstall to fail because the agent cannot start properly. This is a fairly maddening error because you are unable to install or list the software that is on your box. In order to fix this error:

In /var/adm/sw/defaults:

pc_binding_info=ncadg_ip_udp:[2121]

Then you should be able to restart your swagentd daemon which will then allow you to communicate properly to list your software and do installs. I searched around for quite a bit over this one, but finally found this fix. Hope this helps.

Happy Easter everyone

My son Noah got an XBox 360 for his room and could not be happier with the Easter Bunny. I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend with their friends and family. Next week, I will be blogging a bit more about some topics I have been covering recently.

VMWare fusion and lost network connections

One of the few annoyances I have with VMWare fusion on my Mac is that sometimes after waking up from your laptop being asleep is that you will have no network connectivity in your Virtual Machine - at least for Windows. You can disable/enable the NIC inside of the VM, you can change it from NAT to bridged or vice versa, and still nothing. The only way of getting it to work again is to reboot your VM which can be a pain depending on what you were in the middle of. Fortunately, there is a work around for this issue without having to reboot your VM.

You need to create a simple script that has the following in it and make it executable:

cd "/library/application support/vmware fusion/"
sudo ./boot.sh --restart

This script will need to run as root, thus the need for the sudo command which will prompt for the root password on your machine, and then restart the Network Daemons without completely shutting down your virtual machines. This will cause the network functionality to be restored inside of your VM and can be very handy to save you some time during your day.

Transfer or move an Oracle database between platforms

One of the most common things you might have to do with an Oracle database is to move it from one platform to another. For example, say you want to move a database from a Windows 2003 box that was set up for testing to a production Linux server. With Oracle 10g and below, you cannot do this by moving the datafiles since they are in a different format depending on the platform. This can even be done to get your data to different versions of Oracle as well. You must do a full export and import to the target machine. Here are some steps I have used recently which will accomplish this task:

1. On the target machine, use the DBCA or any creation script to create the blank database with the datafiles in the proper location.

2. Configure tnsnames.ora and listener.ora for the new database on the target machine.

3. On the old machine, run the following command to do a full export:
exp system/manager FULL=y FILE=exp_full.dmp LOG=exp_full.log

4. Copy the dmp file to the target machine in binary mode

5. On the new host, export your ORACLE_SID and then run the following command to do the import:
imp system/manager FULL=y FILE=exp_full.dmp LOG=imp_full.log IGNORE=y

That is it - now you have your database copied from your old server to the new server.