I was shocked to see the following when I went to download a patch the other day:

Note: FTP patch download service will be retired as of September 18th, 2009 and “My Oracle Support” will be the only interface for downloading the patches and updates.

The problem is that I am using Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 x86_64 and there is no 64 bit flash player for firefox 3 (64 bit,  which is all that is available via up2date from ULN).

Having said this, I have successfully installed a workaround.

1. rpm -ev firefox (gets rid of 64 bit firefox)
2. download firefox-3.0.7-3.0.1.el4.i386.rpm and frysk-0.0.1.2007.08.03-7.0.1.el4.i386.rpm from http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/EnterpriseLinux/EL4/8/base/i386/
3. download Adobe Flash Player 9 (32-bit) from http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/406/kb406791.html
4. rpm -i frysk-0.0.1.2007.08.03-7.0.1.el4.i386.rpm
5. rpm -i firefox-3.0.7-3.0.1.el4.i386.rpm
6. tar zxvf install_flash_player_9.tar.gz
7. cd install_flash_player_9_linux/
8. ./flashplayer-installer
9. When prompted for the path: /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.7
10. mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox-3.0.7
11. vi /usr/bin/firefox

#!/bin/bash

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/frysk:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

/usr/bin/firefox-3.0.7

You should now be able to access My Oracle Support.

I had an interesting problem happen with a customer late last week. A monitor we maintain on the alert log suddenly paged us with ORA-1116, ORA-1110 and ORA-27041 (Can’t open a database file, too many open files). Nothing had changed on this system in months.

After running: lsof | awk ‘{print $9}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -5 (as with all code blocks, your milage may vary, this was in the bash shell on Redhat Linux), the problem turned out to be with $ORACLE_HOME/nls/data/9idata/lx40030.nlb. A little poking aroud on Metalink led us to bug 5257698. This is a Generic bug for 10.2. The patch replaces lx40030.nlb and lx40003.nlb in $ORACLE_HOME/nls/data/old. Rerunning cr9idata.pl appears to have fixed the open files issue.

The worrisome part of this issue is that they had been live on 10.2 with E-Business Suite 11.5.10.2 for months and no patches or other changes had been made which would have triggered this that we could find. In spite of this, we had to reboot Thursday and were right on the edge of having to shutdown production again on Friday. Luckily, we were able to apply the patch this weekend.

If you are using 10.2 especially with the E-Business Suite, please make sure that you have some form of simple open file monitor running (lsof | wc -l if nothing else).

We discovered that the number of files was flucuating somewhat, but it was basically increasing (this was after a reboot–the problem all started when we got a page from the alert.log that some datafiles apppeared to be missing).

Here is a simple script that can be used to do the monitoring (just put it in cron):

#!/bin/bash
LSOF=/usr/sbin/lsof
MAIL=/bin/mail
WC=/usr/bin/wc
ALERT="root pager1@whatever.com"
THRESHOLD=25000
SUBJ="SID NAME"
COUNT=$($LSOF | $WC -l)
echo "There are $COUNT open files"
if [ "$COUNT" -gt "$THRESHOLD" ]; then
   $MAIL -s "$SUBJ $COUNT open files" $ALERT <<EOF

On $(date), the number of
open files on $(hostname)
was $COUNT.  This is
greater than the alerting threshold
of $THRESHOLD
.
EOF
fi

My presentation from Collaborate 2008 is now available on the Downloads page.

For those of you who missed it, Collaborate 08 in Denver was a great conference this year. Too many papers to get to all the sessions that you wanted to attend (in my mind, that is the major mark of a strong program).

I want to publicly congratulate Sandra Vucinic on being named the OAUG Member of the Year for 2008. Sandra’s dedication to the user group as a whole and to a wide variety of special interest groups and geographic groups is amazing. Sandra and and have both been on the board of the OAUG Database SIG for several years and have been on a variety of panels together at Collaborate and Openworld. Well done, Sandra!

The OAUG premiered the Knowledge Factory (http://www.kf.oaug.org) at the annual Meeting of the Members. If you are an OAUG member, you need to check this out. If you are a user of any of the Oracle Applications and you are not a member, please consider joining. Membership in the OAUG is by company and there is nothing your company can do for the price that will give better access to information and other resources.

On another note, Ahmed Alomari, Mark Farnham, Jerry Ireland and I have formed a group called APPSPERF dedicated to Oracle Applications performance. We held our first workshop at Collaborate this year and it was a huge success. Check out www.appsperf.org for updates on future events.