Linux error id: cannot find name for user ID xxxxx when using Domain Authentication

We recently had a problem, after re-doing some samba configurations on RHEL 5, in which a user would log in (successfully), but then be presented with the follow errors:

id: cannot find name for user ID 10001
id: cannot find name for group ID 10000
id: cannot find name for user ID 10001

Of course, none of our domain ACLs worked for this user, either, which was a real problem. Finally, after running through the more obvious problems (communication with domain controllers: verified with wbinfo; uid and gid allocation and linking: set explicitly with wbinfo; winbind cache (cleared, both in /var/cache/samba and /var/lib/samba); date/time discrepancies; domain membership), we found the culprit: file permissions.

NT_STATUS_PIPE_DISCONNECTED with Samba Winbind and Windows Server 2008 R2 Domain Controller

We recently upgraded our domain controllers to Windows Server 2008 R2, and our RHEL 5 authentication through our Windows domain immediately broke.
Here was the error:

[2010/06/21 09:32:57, 0] rpc_client/cli_pipe.c:rpc_api_pipe(790) rpc_api_pipe: Remote machine adserver.my.edu pipe \NETLOGON fnum 0x8007returned critical error. Error was NT_STATUS_PIPE_DISCONNECTED

A little searching online shows a lot of people with this or related problems, but the solutions appear to be many, and there mostly isn’t a solution posited.
But there is this: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=561325
In short: there's a bug in the samba package that prevents it from working with Windows Server 2008 R2 domains. If you’re running into this problem, the solution is to remove your existing samba installation and install, instead, the samba3x packages.
Note that samba3x was a "technology preview" from RedHat, which means that it offered little support for it. This has changed, and it's now a supported package in RHEL 5.

yum erase samba samba-common
yum install samba3x samba3x-client

You’ll have to re-do your configuration, so it might be worthwhile to back up your /etc/samba/smb.conf file.

Simple Method to Validate Data Read at the beginning of an SSIS Package

We’ve looked at using transactions in an SSIS package to ensure that, for instance, the read data step in your package doesn’t fail after you’ve deleted the data it’s set to replace.
This is a very effective and really useful method, and it’s exceedingly flexible.
If your project spans multiple servers, though, this will require changes to the DST service settings that you might not be able to make.
There’s a simpler way, though it doesn’t offer all of the protections of wrapping your package in a transaction. We’ll take a look at that, here.

Utilizing Transactions in SSIS to Rollback After a Failed Import

SSIS is used primarily to import data into a database, particularly from flat files, but also from other databases. The typical SSIS package for doing this task looks something like the picture at the left: backup the current data, delete the current data from the destination table, and then import the data from the source.
This is all good, and it works well. When it works. The problem is that if there’s a problem with reading the data from the source (say, the credentials for the source database changed), you’ve already blown away the current (production) data. The job fails, and the data remains missing.

Disabling ASR on a Windows Server

ASR stands for automatic server recovery. It's a service whereby the iLO features of a HP server will reboot it, should it detect that something has gone wrong with the operating system. Good idea, except when the detected failure isn't really a failure. Or you want to be able to troubleshoot the problem while it's occurring.
The most straightforward method for changing this setting is to boot the server into the BIOS setup (F9) screen, and browse to Server Availability –> ASR Status.
Sometimes, you’d like to make this change without downtime, however. It appears it’s possible. Unfortunately, it also appears that a reboot, at some point, still is necessary.

Adding an Oracle home to an agent inventory

When an Oracle inventory is saved in a non-standard location, the Oracle Grid Control agent can be unable to enumerate the software that is in that Oracle Home. This is true even when it can find the home itself.
In OEM, you’ll run into an error like that below when you click on the home in the Targets list:

Error Could not find Oracle Home <ORACLE_HOME> in the inventory collected for <hostname>

We’ll use TESTSRV2 as a troubleshooting example.

Locate the oraInst.loc file

The oraInst.loc file contains the inventory for all of the Oracle software. Normally, Oracle maintains a single copy of this file, but when one is saved in a non-standard directory, it can get left out.

Oracle Database loses its OEM configuration after a Cold Backup

This was an annoying problem that took awhile to track down. In short: after our scheduled cold backups, an Oracle (11g) database would lose its configuration in Oracle Enterprise Manager. It would present a "Metric Collection Error" that would go away after reconfiguring the database. The fix, as it turned out, was pretty simple, but it took awhile to tease out. The problem was that the trace directory (bdump in 10g) was too full. Specifically, the metric collection (the process by which OEM gathers data about the database) was timing out. We ruled out performance problems on the database side; the system is not utilized much at all. Instead, we discovered that because there were a lot of files in the trace directory (> 31k), it was taking a long time for the OEM agent to get to the alert log, which is one of the metrics that it collects. This was hinted at in the emagent.trc file:

2010-01-04 13:01:53,087 Thread-47647632 ERROR TargetManager: TIMEOUT reached in computing dynamic properties for target TESTDB,
oracle_database::compute timings were [decideIncludeDB:0-0] [SystemTablespaceNumber:0-0] [SysauxTablespaceNumber:0-0 ...
[DeduceAlertLogFile:1-1] [GetCPUCount:1-1] [EnabledFeatures:1-1] [GetOSMInstance:1-1] [GetNLSParam:1-1] [GetAdrBase:1-(1)]

So you can see above that one of the things it was trying to do was get at the alert log. It took a long time to enumerate all of the small files in the trace directory, so we shut down the instance, cleared out the trace directory, and restarted the instance. That took care of the problem. In troubleshooting this problem, we also increased the dynamic properties timeout setting (dynamicPropsComputeTimeout_oracle_database) in the emd.properties file (in [agent_home]/sysman/config), changing the value from the default (120) to a larger setting (240). That did not help, though it's a good troubleshooting step, should you run into a similar problem.

Installing Oracle Enterprise Manager 10.2 on Windows Server 2008

One would suppose that installing OEM on Windows Server 2008 would be like installing it pretty much in any other Windows environment; Oracle did a pretty good job of making it easy to install and run out-of-the-box under earlier versions of Windows, so it should be easier with the latest version of OEM and Windows, correct?
Wrong. There are a variety of reasons, and we’ll run through them in this exercise, as we install Oracle Enterprise Manager 10.2.0.5 on Windows Server 2008 (NOT R2; this is important!).
As an added bonus, we’ll get the OEM repository database up to 11g.

An Introduction to SSIS - A Beginning Step-by-Step Tutorial

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a *really* powerful data transformation and import tool; it allows for all kinds of data manipulation, both between databases and within them.
The problem is that it’s not entirely intuitive; the learning curve is steep. But you really shouldn’t let that stop you from trying it out: once you’ve got the basics, it’s really quite accessible.
In this series of posts, we’ll do some basic, step-by-step data manipulation with SSIS, starting with importing data from a CSV file into a SQL Server 2008 database. We’ll move on to copying data between Oracle and SQL Server.
For more complicated data, bulk insert allows for some reasonably full choices. You can read about using it in my post here.

Importing data from a CSV file into SQL Server

SQL Server allows for a few ways to import data from a text file, most directly with the import wizard, which is a pretty accessible way to import uncomplicated data. This, by the way, uses SSIS in doing the import, though it wraps it all in a wizard.
SSIS, though, offers the most flexibility, both in terms of data source and destination, as well as what you’d like to do with the data as you’re copying it.

How do I get SSIS?

SSIS is included with SQL Server (non-express editions). It’s installed by default, and you can specify its installation specifically by selecting the “Integration Services” components of SQL Server when you’re doing the installation.
Note, by the way, that SSIS does not require a SQL Server instance in order to run.

ORA-29275 when Accessing a UTF8 Database with SSIS

So when I first started looking into SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), I was told that the learning curve was steep, and that it was worth it to learn what you're doing with it. Truly said. SSIS presents a myriad of possibilities for data, and once you get your head around some of the terminology, creating simple transformations and data imports is a snap. But what about when the problems you encounter span two different products? What if one is Oracle? What if it's 64-bit, on Linux? UTF8? That's really what SSIS is for, and it's possible. But. Lots of Googling. Here's one roadblock I encountered in importing data from an Oracle database into SQL server, along with an unsatisfying workaround. But it does work, and it's easy. If you know of a better solution, I'd love to hear from you!

The Problem

So here's the problem in a nutshell: the Oracle database uses a utf8 character set. SSIS, when connecting with either the OLEDB or ADO.NET data sources, would use something else. What, precisely, I'm unable to discern. I can say that the Unicode setting was set to true in the data manager. This was manifest by a startling Oracle error during the load from the data source: ORA-29275, which is a "partial multibyte character" error. This means that the data doesn't fit the database's character set, which (one assumes) is terrible: such data is almost by definition corrupted, and getting it back reliably is a tricky proposition. Oracle says, basically, that you've got bogus data when you see this error. I was prepared to believe that, as this error occurred even in a simple select statement from the DB server itself.

The Clue

The curious thing about this situation is that, in trying to figure out what was going on, another user had logged into the server using a different OS username. When he connected to the database using the same Oracle user ID, he didn't get any errors. Aha. Environment. NLS_LANG, to be exact. Setting that to American_America.UTF8 took care of the error on the server, and on clients running SQLPLUS, to boot. All should be well, correct? No. The SSIS package continues to fail. Oh, yes: the registry. Don't forget that Oracle stores client NLS data there, as well: HKLM/Software/Oracle/$ORACLE_HOME/NLS_LANG Watch out for any dangling NLS_LANG settings in HKLM/Software/Oracle That surely will fix it, right? Sadly, it didn't, and a desperation reboot didn't help.

The Work-Around

So Google leads me to hints that ADO.NET and OLEDB from Oracle don't really pay much attention to the local NLS_LANG settings. That appears to be the case, or, at least, they don't get their settings from the same place everything else does. So, I return, sadly, to ODBC. And it works! It works well. But it's so non-portable, and, let's face it: ODBC is not anything new and shiny; it'd sure be nice to have all of our SSIS packages all new, self-contained, and .NET-ed. So if you, like me, run into this problem, know that ODBC can be your friend. If you, unlike me, know of a better solution, please let us know! I'll post updates as I encounter them.