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Archive | November, 2006

Problem installing Oracle 10g R2 on Windows (Server)

by on November 20, 2006 in Oracle

The other I wanted to install the Oracle 10g R2 database on our brand new Dell PowerEdge 2950 machine. Well, no problem since I have been doing this for quite some time and I went ahead.

So first grab the latest Oracle installer (10.2.0.1) on Oracle’s website, download the file and unzipped it to my custom installer directory. Then I double clicked the setup.exe which brought up the Dos screen, the screen disappeared and ……… nothing happened!

What’s going on now, I thought and tried to start up the installer again. Same scenario and still no go. Ok, I have had in the past success with going trough the command line and starting the installer from there. Still I have had no success.

All right, after all this is Windows and I might have to restart the machine. But after restarting the machine the installer did not wanted to continue and I was prompted with error mesaages like “oui.exe could not execute…”. Now I was very confused and went to Google to search for any installation issues. No topic, or better said, no solution came up which really helped me. I then went to the Oracle forums and did not find any solution either (just so you see that I really wanted to solve this on my own)…

To make a long story short, I have had success with the installation by moving the installation folder to the desktop and starting the installer from there!

Apparently Oracle does not like some paths on some machines (because on my laptop with Windows XP Pro I have had no problem with the same path as on this Windows Server). This actually brings me to the tuning tip that I got from Oracle stuff where they say that one should change the “TEMP” and “TMP” path in the environment variables to “C:\TEMP”. This should increase the performance of the Windows machine overall.

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Running ColdFusion on IIS and have Apache run on port 80 also

by on November 19, 2006 in CFML, FuseBox, Oracle

The other day, I was asked by a customer how one is able to run ColdFusion with IIS and Apache on the same machine with both Webserver listening on port 80. Since this customer has downloaded our free Digital Asset Management solution, I knew his question was aimed at the Oracle HTTP Server (Apache 1.3) and that solving this could also help our own website and customers behind a firewall which would not allow traffic on port 7777 (the default port installation by Oracle HTTP).

After some thinking I came to the conclusion that this will only be possible with two IP addresses assigned to your network adapter. Thus first we need to assign the new IP to the network adapter.

If that is done we now have to tell IIS and Apache to only listen to the specified IP address. The big problem with this approach is that IIS has a featured called “Socket Pooling” that claims all ports for all loaded IP addresses, even if not configured in IIS!!!. Actually this has struck me for quite some time and it took quite some searching and reading to find this out. Fortunately there is a way to configure IIS to only listen to the IP we want.

Configure IIS to listen to only one IP address

1. First of all grab yourself the “httpdcfg.exe” utility which is within the .cab file within the support folder of the Windows Server 2003. With the latest releases you will find the folder on CD 2. To make it even easier I make it available here.

2. Now go into the command prompt and stop IIS with “net stop http /y”

3. Now tell IIS to listen to the IP you want with “httpcfg set iplisten -i 192.168.1.100″

4. Make sure that IIS has only your IP configured to listen for with “httpcfg query iplisten”

5. Restart IIS with “net start w3svc” (Changes are done but you might not see them already).

Configure Apache to listen to only one IP address

Next we need to tell Apache to only listen to the other IP address. Fortunately this takes only some small part of configuring.

1. Open up your “httpd.conf” file.
2. Search the line where it says “listen 7777″ (or your port you want to change).
3. Change this to read: Listen 80 Listen 192.168.1.101:80 If you have virtual host containers setup to listen to a IP address you will need to change those values as well, of course.
4. Save.

VERY IMPORTANT: If you have done the above you must restart your machine. Doing otherwise with just restarting IIS and Apache will not reflect the changes correctly. If you see it working we still recommend restarting your server (hey, after all it is Windows :-) )

Voila, after you have restarted your machine you should be able to access both IP’s one being served by IIS and the other by Apache.

This setup has been tested and known to work with Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.x and Apache 1.3.x. Also this setup would add some security to your database since you could have a public IP address for, as an example, your IIS and have an internal IP address to your Oracle database over Apache. Your requests to the database would then go to the internal IP. Within Coldfusion your data source would then point to the internal IP. This would be a “secure” setup for your web applications which would only allow access to the database trough your web application.

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Nlite comes to the rescue (my report on not being able to install SP2 on a D800)

by on November 5, 2006 in Uncategorized

Some days ago I posted that I was not able to install SP2 on our Dell D800. Well, after surfing the web some more while waiting for Dell to send me a CD which includes SP2 already (my previous post) I have found a very cool application which allow for a customized Windows Installation! Yes true, one can have its own Windows installation made with NLite.

First I was skeptical but then thought I will give it a try and since NLite is a free tool there is nothing to loose. Ok, so I downloaded it the application installed it and started it up. First of all I was very impressed by the nice GUI and the option it offered. Anyhow, I inserted my Dell CD which only included SP1 and then told NLite that I want to include SP2 on this installer. After some confirmation dialogs it took about 5 minutes and Nlite told me to insert a blank CD for burning (you can also save it to an image file). Another 4 minutes and I had a full Window installer with SP2 already on it.

Needless to say that the whole installation was smooth and our D800 is now running happily (well more or less with Windows).

NLite can be downloaded from http://www.nliteos.com/.

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