Tall Birch

I presented at Sungard Higher Education Summit in Philadelphia about my work with Workflow Web Services. As part of the talk (and the reason I really presented anyway) I showed off our work at Plymouth State on a PHP API I developed for the user and attribute functions. I now have them ready to share.

Unzipping the file will reveal two files — a php class file and a simple html form page. The two are designed to work together once the class file has been configured. Look in the comments at the top to see what needs to be done.

Enjoy!

If you are trying to install Oracle client onto a Microsoft Vista computer, there is a possibility after executing the setup program and waiting for a few seconds you will get a pop-up window stating that oui.exe has stopped working. After a few more seconds of ‘trying’ to figure out what’s wrong, it stops — leaving you to click ok and wonder what happened.

Well, I ran across a random message (thanks oracle forum user user599812) that suggested that if you move your oracle setup folder closer to the root C:\ folder, you might solve your problem. I am here to say that we had this problem, and moving the folder to C:\ solved the problem.

The New Hampshire Electric Coop has a nice integration with Google maps to display their outage status. The visualization is nice and succinct. There are mouse-over features to drill down into town-level data, including how many customers are affected and when they expect to have service returned.

There is also a nice table with the same data that can be sorted by district, county, town, or zip code. Good stuff.

… of course, their map wont look like this if it wasn’t for the December 12 2008 ice storm.

…but I know the database is running, tnsnames.ora is correct and tnsping to that connection is returning ‘OK’. Using sqlplus to connect to the database is returning the error

ORA-12545: Connect failed because target host or object does not exist

what is it?

check to see if your environment variable ‘TWO_TASK’ is set. Once you set this variable to the connection descriptor in your tnsnames.ora file, you’ll likely be ok.

All credit for this wonderful trick belongs to my co-worker Adam.

If you need to replace a common string in multiple files to another common string, you can use the rename command.

rename _from_ _to_ filename

so rename a b a*.log

would change a1.log to b1.log and a2.log to b2.log

further, if you want to remove that common string, you can type the following

rename _from_ '' filename

so rename a '' a*.log

would change a1.log to 1.log and a2.log to 2.log

The best example came when we were cloning a database and the dbf files had the oracle sid in the name.

rename prod_ test_ prod_*.dbf

this changed
prod_system01.dbf to test_system01.dbf
prod_users01.dbf to test_users01.dbf
prod_sysaux01.dbf to test_sysaux01.dbf
… and so on.

Tired of seeing only some of the command/process information when you type ps?

For example, typing

ps -aux

will fill only to the edge of your screen.
If your screen is less than 132 characters wide, you can expand your line to that mark with

ps -auxw

and excess will wrap to the next line.
However if you just want to see it all, add a second w

ps -auxww

This will show everything, wrapping when necessary.

Creating a self-signed certificate that is oracle friendly got a lot easier when I discovered the orapki utility via a comment made by ‘Frank‘ here.

Simply navigate to your oracle wallet directory and type
orapki wallet create -wallet ./ -auto_login
(you will be prompted to establish a new password for this wallet)

and then type

orapki wallet add -wallet ./ -dn "CN=cname, OU=ounit, O=org, L=city, ST=state, C=country" -keysize 1024 -self_signed -validity 365
(where the dn entries are customized to your environment)

You will be prompted for the same password you set with the first command, and you are all set.

One thing we have done is changed the validity (hey, if it’s self-signed, do you care how long it lasts?) from 365 (1 year) to 7300 (roughly 20). Now my self-signed cert is set until 2028 with just two commands.