I'm In!

I went round and round with Oracle Support creating spin-off TARs and transferring it from one group to another. I finally found an article that said one of the 11.5.x versions was really executing fnd_web_sec.validate_login() under the covers.

Might as well give that a try, SINCE I'M STILL WAITING.

So I ran the function on my GUEST user and sure enough, it came back with a "Y" which indicated the GUEST user and password were correct.

I then tried the same for my SYSADMIN user and the function returned "N".

Hmm, that's interesting, let me try it again.

Sure enough, my old SYSADMIN password didn't work for some reason. I posted the results in the TAR and the analyst suggested I change my SYSADMIN password with FNDCPASS.

I changed it, and was in!

If this little tidbit of an upgrade is published somewhere, it sure wasn't obvious to me.

Of course, now I have to figure out why anything using the forms servlet won't come up. And how to use WebADI. And why my printers aren't defined.

But at least I'm in!

Fun & Games, Part III

The main TAR had been in "Review" status for 24 hours, so I duty managed it. I usually don't like to duty manage things because if you cry wolf enough, eventually nobody will listen.

The analyst updated the TAR and wanted the results from about a dozen URLs along with another half dozen log files.

Aha, trying to bury me, are you?

After an hour of trying the URLs (which 90% of them were from 11.5.9 and didn't work in R12), I assembled the output and packaged in a nice neat .tar file. As expected, it went back to "Review" status.

Yesterday I had something else to do, so I wasn't very diligent in following up. Which was OK, because there was nothing to follow up with. My TAR remained in "Review" status for the whole day.

This morning I had some free time, so I duty managed my TAR again. Within 20 minutes, the analyst handed the TAR off to another group by creating a "spinoff" and marked the original TAR as "Awaiting Internal Response".

It will end up being a 2 second fix, I just know it. A week later, and I'm still waiting for the slightest bit of help.

The Fun & Games Continued

Eventually my TAR from R12 Upgrade Fun & Games suggested that I rerun autoconfig for my DB Tier and I ran into another problem. Since it was not related to the original TAR, I opened a new one and put the original TAR in "Waiting for Customer" state until my new problem could be solved. Interestingly enough, the root cause of the new problem was that I had my $ORACLE_HOME in a different location than rapidWiz thought it should be, so rapidWiz put my newly created context file in the wrong location. I was trying to run adconfig.sh with an 11.5.9 context file, which kept giving me an error about version compatibility. Fair enough, I was back on track in about two days.

So I went back to my original TAR and posted that while I ran autoconfig on my db tier and bounced all my services, that still didn't fix my issue.

And I wait...

While waiting, I found Stephen Chan's blog that pointed me to Oracle Application Server Diagnostic Tools and Log Files in Applications R12 (ml note 454178.1). Definitely something to test, SINCE I'M JUST WAITING.

...to be continued... (hopefully)

R12 Upgrade Fun & Games

So I've been toying around with an Oracle R12 upgrade lately. The first attempt went miserably wrong with all sorts of issues when I applied RUP3.

Then I decided that upgrading my middle-tier to Linux x86_64 sounded like a good idea. Except it wasn't. You see, first off 11.5.9 isn't supported on x86_64, so you can't add a node to your existing 11.5.9 instance. And you can't install an R12.0 base on x86_64 and then upgrade your 11.5.9 db, because that too is not supported. I ended up collapsing my two-tier environment to a single tier so I can upgrade to R12 and then add an R12 node that runs x86_64 later on. That, I double checked, is supported.

I performed the 11.5.9 to R12.0.0 upgrade again on my test system and applied the RUP4. Surprisingly, I only encountered about four problems. Two of the problems were not really problems because I wasn't running those modules and two problems that I researched on Metalink and quickly resolved.

When I brought the whole thing up (on a single tier), all the middle-tier services came up quite fine. Yes, I was surprised too.

The first time I tried to login is when my problems started. The ominous "Login failed. Please verify your login information or contact the system administrator" message comes up. Hey, I am the system administrator, WTF I am supposed to do from here? No errors, no messages, no nothing.

No problem, I'll just go to my standard diagnostic tests that I used in 11.5.9 to see where my problem is. Wait, there's no FND_WEB.Ping anymore. Nor is there any isItWorking servlets.

Finally, I find http://hostname/OA_HTML/jsp/fnd/aolj_conn_test.jsp and run through the tests. Surprisingly, everything but the AOL/J connection test works.

"Aha, I'll provide that information to Oracle Support and they'll be able to tell me where to look right away.", I thought to myself.

"Please upgrade to the latest RUP" was their response.

Me: "Errr, I am on RUP4."

Them: "Please rerun autoconfig."

Me. "Errr, done, but that doesn't solve my problem. Besides, my AOL/J connection test doesn't work. What does AOL/J do and why would it fail with this error?"

Wait.

Wait.

Wait.

Me: "Um, this is kind of urgent. When I try to login to the forms server directly I get 'APP-FND-01542: This Applications Server is not authorized to access this database.'"


Wait.

Wait.

Me: "I found that if I change my s_appserverid_authentication to OFF in the context file I get a different error logging into the forms server. Now I'm getting 'Error: validateLogin returned false; failed to login as XXX, please try again'"

Wait.

Wait.

Me: "Is anyone looking at this TAR?"

Them: "Sorry for the delay, I am looking at your log files"

Wait.

Wait.

...to be continued.