Wednesday 29 August 2012

Connecting to the SES DB remotely

OOTB the Secure Enterprise Search database is secured by IP address which means if you connect either using Jdev or sqlplus remotely, you will get:
 Got minus one from a read call
To fix this issue simply follow the Oracle Support article 1446113.1

Sunday 12 August 2012

Setting a WebCenter Maintenance Page

Background
When you shutdown WebCenter, the apache weblogic mod takes over the control of error pages and shows:

Failure of server APACHE bridge:
No backend server available for connection: timed out after 10 seconds or idempotent set to OFF.


Let's face it that's not user friendly and needs to be replaced with a nice page.

Solution
You can set a custom error page following the steps below:

*if you haven't got OHS_HOME, I recommend you set up this environment variable. The path should look similar to the below:
/apps/oracle/product/middleware/Oracle_WT1/instances/instance1/config/OHS/ohs1

First copy your custom html to the server.
Move the files to
$OHS_HOME/htdocs/
For example you have a file called
maintenance.html

Next modify the config file for the weblogic mod
nano $OHS_HOME/mod_wl_ohs.conf
within the Webcenter location add

<Location /webcenter>
LOCATION STUFF
</Location>

Now to test the change, restart OHS. (if you're in clustered mode run with 1 spaces, 1 OHS only for now)
Stop Spaces.
Go to WebCenter home.
New html maintenance page displays.
Restart spaces in WLS console.
Spaces displays correctly.

Ensure you copy the files/change in every OHS if you're in a clustered deployment.

Business Justification
The reason behind having a maintenance page, is to provide links to areas if WebCenter is being relied on as home page or key jumping point. In key business contexts people need to find key systems even if the system is down (timesheets, expenses, or other). The next step will be for you to assess if you need to handle the event when both OHS and WebCenter are down and what error page should be displayed at that point. I recommend the below:
"The Administrator of this system is currently busy looking for a new job, the system will be back up shortly, thanks for your patience"