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Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Widget for Voting in the Mix!

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

So I’ve been missing from here, email, etc for a while but I’ll address that later, for a sneak preview of why you can see my new disclaimer on the right hand side of this blog.  If you’ve been paying attention to the guys over at AppsLab (and who wouldn’t be), you’ll have noticed that they added some new functionality to Oracle Mix to nominate and vote on sessions for this years Oracle Open World.  Not too long after the launch Jake mentioned that they needed some new ideas on how to review the submitted sessions.  I had an idea to create a wordpress widget that lists all the sessions in a random order.  It took me a little while squeezing it out while life got in the way, but here it is:

Download mix-oow-2008-widget

If you want to check it out you can see it running in the sidebar of every page on this blog.  It’s a pretty generic plug-in, if you want to stream any feed from mix it should be pretty simple to modify, just remove the parsing for votes in the code.  The installation is pretty simple: (more…)

GM Onstar Stolen Vehicle System – ARGH

Friday, October 12th, 2007

As many of you know, I’m a car guy just as much as I am a technology guy. Back in 98 I had a full pc in my car playing Mp3s with a 20×2 LCD touch screen and I’ve already proven I ran replace my keys with RFID, so needless to say I love the convergence of technology and automobiles. But this one actually scares me. This week OnStar (the GM in vehicle cell service) announced that they’ve paired with law enforcement to slow down your vehicle if it’s stolen or involved in a high speed chase.

http://jalopnik.com/cars/gadgets/onstar-unveils-new-stolen-vehicle-slowdown-system-308640.php

While initially it sounds cool and helps to ensure your car doesn’t end up upside down or in a guard rail during a chase, what worries me is the system itself.  Every OnStar vehicle is essentially equipped with a cell phone that has access to the onboard ECM, PCM, etc.  The last gen GM vehicles were supposed to be highly secured so that no one except GM could tune them.  Well the codes were cracked within a couple months and the aftermarket tuners are off and running.  I can just envision this system being cracked and having thousands  of GM vehicles disabled on our freeways during rush hour.  I’m sure OnStar has spent millions on their design to make sure this doesn’t happen, but as we know, don’t tell a geek he can’t do something because he’ll throw your millions in code out the window with a simple embarrassing back door.

If anyone at GM is listening I’d be more than happy spending a weekend looking through the code making sure there aren’t any issues ;)

Twitter Tracking

Sunday, October 7th, 2007

A little while ago (ok about 2 weeks) Twitter released a new feature that lets you track “concepts.” The idea is that you can track anytime anyone, not just the people you follow, mentions a word or series of words. That way if you want to see anytime anyone posts something with the word “Oracle” in it or “Matt Topper” you will immediately get an update. While that’s cool, what more interests me is the model they are implementing it with. I’d really like to see the event model and code they are using to filter every post that is made. Holy overhead batman!! Anyways, if you want to start tracking stuff, all you need to do is text your Twitter number with the message “Track <topic here>” i.e. “Track Oracle”. You can see their blog post here: http://twitter.com/blog/2007/09/tracking-twitter.html and if you want to track me I’m over there at http://twitter.com/topperge

OK, back to my install fest weekend. (and playing with RFID on the side)

Oracle Adaptive Access Manager : Day X : Suspended…

Saturday, October 6th, 2007

Well, I spent a good amount of time last night installing and configuring the OAAM software, getting it up and running, configuring the data sources, etc. and came to the point where you have log in. Hmm…well…the docs don’t have a default user name and password to use after the install. So being Oracle we all know where the default user name is at least stored, in the database somewhere right? Wrong, all the user tables were empty for the product. So at this point I’m stuck, I’ve got an SR open, but being such a new product I doubt that will get me far. I’ve also got a couple emails into people I know internally at Oracle so hopefully Monday I’ll get some updates. In the meantime I’m going to work on some slides for my upcoming Oracle World presentations and finish up some virtual machines and get them uploaded to the OracleVMs.com site. S3 has turned out to be a pain to get everything working, but I’m close, hopefully I’ll have a release by the end of the weekend.

Oracle Adaptive Access Manager : Day 1 : The Database Config and Install

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Lets start with a little overview of the OAAM Architecture. The software is made up of two components:

  1. OASA – Oracle Adaptive Strong Authenticator
  2. OARM – Oracle Adaptive Risk Manager

The OASA component is provides numerous means to protect from phishing, pharming, trojan, and keylogging attacks. The different authentication options are interesting and well designed to protect an organization. The OARM component tracks user usage patterns to help prevent fraud detection. It uses such things as your user name, known computer attributes, known locations you access the system from, etc. to build a comprehensive profile about you. It also allows organizations to monitor in real time what users are accessing their systems and either automatically or manually (through an operator) force a user to perform a secondary level of authentication to prove they are the actual person at the computer. The Risk Manager creates a virtual fingerprint of your users through a combination of IP addresses, geo location, city, state, country information, connection type, connection speed, routes, isp flag, ASN, carrier, top level domain, registering organization, hostnames, routers, and how quickly you navigate pages. You never realized there was so much stuff people could track you by and you don’t really have an option of controlling it.

OAAM is deployed just like any standard J2EE application. It’s packaged as a set of jar files, some static images, and database scripts with property files to link it all together. Nothing here that I haven’t done a million times before. So lets start at the bottom and work our way up. I started with a standard Oracle 10.1.4 OID /SSO deployment and 10.1.3 OC4J/OHS install. So onto the database.

The database much be of version 9.2.0.4 or higher, honestly, if you’re deploying a new software architecture and still using 9.2.0.4 database to store your data give me a call and I’d love to discuss the business reasons for sticking with that. Lucky for me, the basic OID install uses a 10.1.0.5 database so I’m ready.

The first step is to validate the database parameters so that they match the minimum requirements for the install. We first must get access to the pile so we can change it into an spfile to open the database. So first we log into the database as sys.

After we log into the database, create a pfile from the database parameters, after the pfile is created you need to then edit the init<sid>.ora file you’ve created. To do this we set our ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_SID, and PATH.

$> export ORACLE_HOME=/software/oracle/oaam_oid_1014
$> export ORACLE_SID=oaamoid
$> export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH
$> sqlplus /nolog
sql> connect /as sysdba
sql> create pfile = ‘initoaamoid.ora’ from spfile;
sql> quit;
$> vi $ORACLE_HOME/dbs/initoaamoid.ora

Within the pfile you need to set the minimums for the following settings:

*.db_writer_processes=4
*.fast_start_mttr_target=300
*._hash_join_enabled=TRUE
*.open_cursors=2000
*.pga_aggregate_target=512M
*.processes=500
*.query_rewrite_enabled=’FALSE’
*.sessions=500
*.shared_pool_size=500M
*.star_transformation_enabled=’FALSE’
*.timed_statistics=TRUE
*.undo_management=’AUTO’
*.undo_retention=’3600′
*.session_cached_cursors=500
*.commit_write=’BATCH,NOWAIT’

One thing to note, commit_write is not a 10g R1 parameter, it was introduced in 10gR2, so the instructions are a bit off, but not hard to get around, just don’t put it in the end of your pfile. Write out your pfile to the OS and finally we log back into the database, create the spfile from the pfile and start the database.

$> sqlplus /nolog
sql> connect /as sysdba
sql> create spfile = ’spfileoaamoid.ora’ from pfile;
sql> startup
sql> quit

Once the database is started we then have to load all of the data that allows the components to run. To do this we log back into the database and then execute the db_setup.sql script.

$> sqlplus system/<oraclevms>
sql> @/software/source/oracle/AdaptiveAccessManager10g/oracle_fa_database/db_setup.sql;

The script asks you to enter the location where you want to put the two new tablespaces the application creates, the name of the user you want to use, and the password, then halfway through the script it asks you the name of your temp tablespace (TEMP). Once the script started executing it creates the actual tablespaces, database user, database objects, loads the initial data, and then the location database (for the ip address locations).

Alright, that was stupid simple, the database is done, stay tuned for the software deployment. I apologize for no pictures on this one, I was using a different machine than the one I normally do and my copy of SnagIt was setup to only snap one screen shot and overwrite it each time. I promise the rest of the install log will have pictures to go along. Thats all for now, check back in a few hours (maybe 24) for the java application deployment instructions.

Where have all the developers gone?

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

In the IOUG Fusion Task Force meeting this week, we were discussing what could be provided to build a better community around the Fusion Middleware world and it’s ever growing list of products and acquisitions. A lot of us are classic Oracle guys that have been doing Java, ADF, App Server, Portal, Discoverer, etc. since its first release. We’ve always known the standard Oracle Metalink, Forums, and ListServs for Oracle help when we need it. Now with so many acquisitions it’s getting incredibly hard to catch up and the communities for many of the new products don’t exist.

One of the big questions that came up was where have all the developers gone. For some reason the term “The Lost Developers” popped into my head, which of course popped the bad 80’s movie “The Lost Boys,” and in turn this bad graphic. (Trust me you don’t want to try and understand whats in my head)

The Lost Oracle Developers

But in all seriousness, where did everyone go. I know a lot of the people went to start their own independent consulting shops, some stayed with Oracle, but what about the rest of the world? What about all the customers and other implementation partners? I went through, looked at the acquisition list, and couldn’t find user groups or message boards for many of them. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places or haven’t been taught the secret handshake yet, but here is the list I came up with:

Agile: Nothing
AppForge: Palm and Windows Media Local User Groups, nothing centralized
Bharosa: Nothing
Tangosol: LCUG (http://wiki.tangosol.com/display/LCUG/Home)
HotSip: Nothing
Siebel (Analytics): ITtoolbox Group (http://siebel.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/siebel-analytics-l)
SigmaDynamics: Nothing
Sleepycat: Nabble Forums (http://www.nabble.com/Berkeley-DB-f2899.html)
Stellent: Stellentforums.com and regional user groups
Context Media: Nothing
Oblix: Nothing
Octet String: Nothing
Thor Technologies: Nothing
TimesTen: Nothing
TripleHop: Nothing

Yes there are the Oracle boards, but many of them aren’t trolled by the experts of the acquired companies yet. So what happened? Where did everyone go? Right now I’m working on building a lot of pre-built virtual machines for my side project (thanks again for the people volunteering to help), but on the newer components I’m having to learn a ton as I go and it would be helpful to bounce ideas / questions off of people who have already been there and done that. I’m sure a lot of them are having the same problems now trying to deploy on to the Fusion Middleware stack.

So here it is, an open invite to come out of the corners and reveal yourselves. Where is everyone hiding? How can we build a better collaborative Oracle development world? I would love to hear people’s feedback. Maybe we need a myspace or facebook for Oracle people? I’m only half joking here, there sure are enough of us to keep it busy. What features would make it a kick ass collaboration environment? Forums? Wiki? Torrents? Instant Messaging? Desktop Sharing? Blogs Provider? Maybe just an Aggregator? Rent a VM development environments? Calendaring? Mapping? Presence? Ok, enough web 2.0 buzz words (crap, there was another one).

Call me, email me, IM me, post comments here, I just want to figure out how to make it easier on all of us.

The 2 Minute Job That Always Takes Me Too Long

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

I’m just going to post this up here because this is something I do all the time and for some reason it will never stick in my head. The idea is that I have a server root that I want to forward to another URL with mod_rewrite. Yeah, I know, I could just write it in mod_alias or a quick meta tag or JavaScript or whatever, but I live the clean mod_rewrite solution that I can bake right into a httpd.conf or .htaccess file. So here is it, whenever you want to forward something like: http:///www.mywebsite.com to http://www.mywebsite.com/pls/portal here it is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.mywebsite.com/pls/portal [R,L]

OK, enough, done…night.

PS- As you can tell I’m a bit frustrated with myself over this one. It’s only about the 100th time I’ve done something like this and I can never remember the syntax.

Game back on!!

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

As some of you know, I was working on a side project a while ago to provide pre-built Oracle virtual machines and distribute them via torrents over the net. I talked a little bit about it back here. Well some people got wind of it and warned me that I would face problems with the Oracle licensing and it would be best if I didn’t move forward. Luckily, the Oracle licensing has been changed and I should be able to move forward. Also, Amazon’s S3 service is now providing torrent based seeding for files. Somehow their bandwidth bills are a lot less than mine (I guess when you buy in bulk you have quite the cost savings ;) )

Thanks to the people that helped out the first time beta testing and then getting disappointed when I didn’t actually launch the thing. I promise this time will be different, if anyone wants to help out let me know. I’m geeked about this again!!!

Blank VMware Guest on Server When Moving to Linux from Windows?

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

I’ve had a lot of people ask me about this lately, so I figured I’d write a quicky on how to fix this problem.

Problem Behavior:
A virtual machine was built in VMware Workstation on Microsoft Windows.  The person then FTP’d the machine to a Linux based VMware Server instance so that the image could be run in a central location.  After logging into the VMware Console for the server box, they boot the newly transferred virtual machine, but there is nothing on the interface.  The box boots fine, they can see it come up on the network, the MUI shows the box up and running and serving requests but each time the machine is connected to through the console it just displays a blank screen.
Solution:
The problem comes with permissions error on the Linux OS.  In order to see the machine through the console the vmx file must be executable for the user you’re starting it as.  The machine has no problem being bootable because it is readable, but in order to view it it must also be executable.

How to fix it:
Log into your Linux based VMware Server machine and find the directory where the virtual machine you are starting is located at.  Find the .vmx file and chmod it so that it’s executable i.e. chmod 755 myvm.vmx

Thats it.  Reboot the machine, reconnect through the VMware Console and you’re good to go.  This one stumped me for a while the fix time I came across it.

Collaborate Papers

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

I’ve had a lot of inquiries since Collaborate to get copies of my papers and presentations I gave. So I figured I’d put them up for everyone to download directly. If you click the “Papers and Presentations” link in the banner they are all listed there, or you can just click on the URL below:
http://www.matttopper.com/index.php?page_id=17

If you want any additional info on the topics feel free to call or email me. My contact info is on the right.