Installing OpenSolaris on a server with a HP Smart Array Controller

I'm quite new to OpenSolaris; insofar as it's like Linux, I'm pretty comfortable, but there appear to be enough little gotchas to make the learning curve a little steeper than one might like. Take, for instance, the fact that OpenSolaris doesn't ship with the drivers for the almost-ubiquitous HP Smart Array controller. That makes for an installation hiccup that a quick Google search shows many people have found difficult. It's too bad, too: it appears that this has stymied a lot of folks in trying to install the OS. Like most things, the solution is easy, once you know how to do it. These instructions, originally, were for OpenSolaris 2008.11, but they've since been updated to work with 2009.06.

Setting up a VNC remote desktop in Enterprise Linux 4, 5, and 6

This is something that is terribly useful, and there are lots of how-to articles running around. Unfortunately, I've not found one that was quite complete, especially for someone who is only just getting familiar with Linux (which is precisely when you most need a GUI!). So this is a step-by-step instruction list on getting a remote X Windows session set up on enterprise linux 4, 5, and 6 (RHEL and CENTOS) that can be accessed with VNC viewer software (do a quick search on VNC if you're not familiar with it). In some set-ups, people create a VNCSERVER process that runs all the time. This does allow for persistent sessions (sessions that survive a disconnect), but it's not really what most of us need most of the time. What we're doing here is using xinetd, which will spin up Xvnc on an as-needed basis. Much cooler. Please note: vnc is not a secure protocol. What this means is that any traffic that VNC sends over the wire is *not* encrypted. Do make sure that your use of this doesn't put you at risk for having sensitive data (passwords, for instance) compromised.

SQL Server Bulk Insert Using a Format File to Read Data that also Includes a Comma in the String

There are a lot of resources out there on the net about using SQL Server Bulk Insert, and there are a lot of technical discussions about the inner details of Format Files. The problem is that there aren't many concrete examples of a very common need: importing a CSV (comma-separated) file where a quoted string also includes a comma. Here's an example of what some data might look like:

ID,Name,Phone 
100983,"Jones, Frank",555-1212
118928,"Smith, Joe",555-1313
115454,"Franklin, Alibaster",555-1414

Using a bulk insert statment without a format file would give us data that would look like this:

ID	Name	Phone
100983	"Jones	Frank"	555-1212
118928	"Smith	Joe"	555-1313
115454	"Franklin	Alibaster"	555-1414

When in reality, we want the data to look like this:

100983	Jones, Frank	555-1212
118928	Smith, Joe	555-1313
115454	Franklin, Alibaster	555-1414

WebLogic Case Sensitivity

Prior to v9.0, Weblogic was case-insensitive in Windows, but starting with v9, the default is, like Apache, to be case sensitive. A web search on changing that behavior isn't very helpful, and the setting is buried a bit, so I thought I'd post the instructions on changing that setting. The first step is to run the weblogic admin console. The default URL, once that has been started, is to browse to http://servername:9999/console. You'll be prompted for the username/password that you configured when installing weblogic. Once there, click on Domain-> Security-> Advanced. There you will see a "Web App Files Case Insensitive:" setting. By default, this is set to "false". Change it to "os", click on save. Once it's been saved, the changes have to be Activated. Click on the green Activate Changes button on the left-hand side of the screen.

You'll have to reboot the admin console, as well as your standard weblogic web services, for this change to take effect.

Persistent Problem with MS Update

Have you ever gotten a Windows system that simply won't update? That is, it'll find all the updates it needs from Microsoft, but the updates won't do anything but fail. It's a bummer, because the normal reboot simply won't fix the problem. It turns out there is a solution. The problem appears to come from XP SP3, beauty, that. In any case, this should fix the problem: Run: REGSVR32 WUAPI.DLL REGSVR32 WUAUENG1.DLL REGSVR32 ATL.DLL REGSVR32 WUPS2.DLL REGSVR32 WUCLTUI.DLL REGSVR32 WUPS.DLL REGSVR32 WUWEB.DLL REGSVR32 WUAUENG.DLL

Windows Vista Look and Feel in XP

If you're interested in making your XP system look like Vista, there are a ton of resources out there. Why another one? Because I want to keep it simple. I found two resources that gave me the whiz-bang look and functionality without fiddling too much with lots of other apps. In short, I used what must be the gold standard, Vista Transformation Pack, along with TrueTransparency and the Microsoft Zune XP theme. With these three packages, I got more than I needed, and they're all free. I ended up unselecting the toolbar and start button transformations from the vista transformation pack; I don't care for the tool bar, and the Start Button just wasn't quite where I think it should be: you can't right-click on the icons, and there's just a bit missing. Still, it makes for a great user experience, without a lot of the Vista negatives.

Desktop Search for Windows x64

Windows released version 4 of its desktop search recently, and I must say that it (mostly) works well. With the Vista desktop, one simply can begin typing a search string at the start menu, and Windows will present the search results there as you type.

The problem: UNC indexing isn't apparently supported in the 64 bit environments, at least not with Server 2008, and the network shares I want to index are stored on Windows Server 2000 boxes: those won't run the new indexing tool.

So what to do?

PeopleSoft Upgrade Woes

When upgrading a PeopleSoft database from 8.47 to 8.49, we ran into a curious problem, receiving this error:

SQL Error. Error Position: 14 Return: 6550 - ORA-06550: line 1, column 15: PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "TABLE" when expecting one of the following: := . ( @ % ;

It turns out that it was a simple problem, but it wasn't at all obvious from the error: the DDLORA.DMS script that ran during the initial part of the upgrade was old; for whatever reason, it hadn't gotten updated by the install process. This is what was happening: Datamover was importing the tables, and the first succeeded. Then: it went to compute statistics. That's where things went wrong. Here's why: the ddlora.dms script defines not only default tablespace parameters, but also the method by which DataMover will compute statistics. Pre-8.48 PeopleSoft did it using the 'analyze table' method, while 8.49 uses the dbms stats method. With the old statistics parameters in the PSDDLMODEL table, the compute stats call failed, and so did the upgrade.

To fix this problem, we installed PeopleTools 8.49 again on an empty PS Home, and then we copied the new script over.

404 (Not Found) Error When clicking on MySite "My Profile" tab in SharePoint

This error is vexing, though there's a simple solution documented in MS kb924399. I've summarized the solution below with some assumptions about settings that folks normally use. In short, the problem is that there isn't a site collection set up using the appropriate template in the MySite web application. We'll correct that in a few steps. Note: it's entirely possible--even likely--that you've already got a site collection created at the root of the mysite web application. If this is a single personal site, that's part of your problem. This site will need to be backed up and deleted before you can go further, assuming that all of your other personal sites are using a different path. First, we need to create the managed path that SharePoint will use for this site collection.

This can be anything, but most people will have created their sites with the default root ( / ) site collection. So we'll go with that for our purposes.

To do this, click on Application Mangement -> Define Managed Paths. Make sure, once the defined managed paths screen comes up, that you've got the correct MySite web application selected in the top-right. Go ahead and create the managed path at the desired location.

Next, we'll want to create the site collection using the correct template.

Click on Application Management -> Create Site Collection to bring up the site collection screen. Make sure you've got the correct web application selected on the left, and then select the managed path you created in the step above for the URL.

Give the site collection a title, like 'Personal Sites', and -- here's the money part -- select the "My Site Host" template from the Enterprise template tab.

Fill in the site administrators fields appropriately and click on OK.

After doing these steps, the My Profile tab should work again.

Simplifying SharePoint Structure with Site Collections

Site Collections in SharePoint 2007 are the "pieces" of a web application. Personal sites (my site), for instance, are each a site collection. There are a couple of real benefits, too, for using many site collections--instead of multiple web applications--to form the bulk of your SharePoint implementation. SharePoint Maintenance On the whole, it's simpler to have few IIS web sites (and few web applications) and many site collections. This provides for fewer urls (and thus fewer IIS sites) and fewer ACLs (permissions) to maintain. The permissions piece, in particular, can become a real bear in a large SharePoint installation, as each piece of a web application and all of the pieces of all of its site collections can all have different permissions assigned to them. Using site collections as the primary content-delivery piece can simplify the permissions considerably. Backups/Restore Backups in SharePoint are a tricky business, partly because Microsoft gives you many ways to perform backups and recovery. The simplest solution for backing up your SharePoint installation is to do a farm-level backup, which gives you the option of restoring individual web applications. The downside to using lots of web applications, as most SharePoint administrators quickly discover, is that you end up with a multitude of IIS web sites. To create subdirectories within these sites, administrators create site collections within them, giving a pretty complex structure. Moreover, when you perform a web application backup, you have to restore the web application, which includes all of the site collections contained within it. That complicates the restore process quite a bit. Some implementations (particularly very large SharePoint sites) will benefit from the above scenario, but most people can get all the functionality and simpler administration by using site collections as the primary structural unit. Because you can backup and restore individual site collections, it allows you a lot more flexibility and granularity in your backup and restore strategy. Moreover, it happens from time to time that a web application configuration become corrupt, such that, for instance, the my sites functionality no longer works. If you have backed up the individual site collections from that web application, it is a trivial task to create a new web application and import the component site collections into it. Backing up site collections, however, does bring up a problem: because stsadm (the admin tool used to backup site collections) requires a site collection url as a command line parameter, there's not an out-of-the-box way to backup all site collections in one fell swoop. Happily, this problem has been recognized by many competent scripting folks. The script we use is a modified version of the one posted by Mauro Cardarelli on his blog. It runs through all of the site collections in a given url and backs them all up individually. Note that, should you use this script, it was written for SharePoint 2003, and as a result, the path to the stsadm executable needs to be updated from C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\BIN\stsadm to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\stsadm.