Oracle OpenWorld 2014

This year has passed by faster than I would have liked.  If you can tell by the sparatic posting in my blog.  But yet again, Oracle OpenWorld 2014 is upon us.  This the largest gathering of Oracle professionals in the world held every year in San Francisco, CA.

I have been selected to present twice, which is really exciting.  The first session is in conjunction with my favorite user group IOUG.  For those not familure, user groups are external organizations not run by Oracle, that have independent leaders, and are focused on helping their members through leraning, sharing, mentoring, and networking.  The IOUG also provides access to Oracle internal resourcses through it's Special Interest Groups or SiG's.  The SIG range from hardware to software for Oracle and provides a voice for it's members to sway Oracle product and support.

So back to my presentations:

Architect Your Data Center Infrastructure from Scratch [UGF9244]

Sunday, Sep 28, 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM PDT- Moscone South - 308

In this session I'll be joined by a panel of Oracle experts reconized in the industry and by Oracle through their ACE program; Kirby McCord, Charles Kim, Kai Yu, and Tariq Farooq.  We will be doing a panel discussion or debate on modern infrastructuer architecture.  What if you could build your data center from scratch?  Would you go all cloud?  How about engineered systems?  Maybe low cost commodity hardware and virtulization?  

This will be a condensed version of the two hour session we did at Collaborate (the user group conference), see my previous post about that session.  Bring your questions and lets get the conversation started.

The second session is in conjunction with Oracle

Zero Downtime for Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Exalogic [CON7957]

Tuesday, Sep 30, 3:45 PM - 4:30 PM PDT - Moscone South - 270

Here again I'll be on a panel joined by fellow users of the Exalogic platform discussion our experineces with running Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) on Oracle Engineered systems.  Specifically we will be talking about the impact on system reliability.  Hear from existing customers on the Exalogic platform, how they have adopted the engineered system into their application ecosystem.

Through conferences and user groups I have had the pleasure to meet many of the experts in the field and work with them on volunteer opportunities.  I'm excited to be at OpenWorld again, and I look forward to seeing you there.

Oracle Database backups, OEM Cloud Control, and LDAP

So I need to make more of a habit out of posting short blogs every week.  So this week I'm putting out a little tidbit that we discovered this week.

Our environment is a new Exadata X4-2 and we were trying to configure database backups through Oracle Enterprise Manger Cloud Control (OEMCC).  This is a standard backup job scheduled / setup through the database management pages in OEMCC, and is not really unique to Exadata.  But what we ran into is partial to Exadata and partial to just OEMCC.

As with many large corporations, users and passwords for our environment are stored in LDAP.  In general this is transparent to all applications.  Well there are a few exceptions, and this really gets into some low level details on how Linux security (specifically PAM in this case) and applications like OEMCC interact.

While setting up the jobs in OEMCC and trying to test the backup using OS credentials we kept receiving invalid password errors.  We then worked to verify the password from the OS level, and found that it worked fine.   So clearly this was a standard error message, not specific to the real problem.

Thanks to our team we found two specific My Oracle Support (MOS) notes that resolved this issue:

• Error 'incorrect password' reports when run command su after inputting correct password on exadata server (Doc ID 1460921.1)
• How to Configure the Enterprise Management Agent Host Credentials for PAM and LDAP (Doc ID 422073.1)

Both of these changes were made, and then our backup jobs were working fine.

A few notes on the document 422073.1 which is slightly vague on the PAM setup / changes for the OEM Agent.  Our systems worked by using the RedHat version of the /etc/pam.d/emagent file such as this:

#%PAM­1.0

auth   required  pam_ldap.so 

account   required  pam_ldap.so 

password  required  pam_ldap.so 

session   required  pam_ldap.so

And the update to the agent commonenv file, we used the lib64 version of the pam library located here: /lib64/libpam.so.0

We did not need to install the pam-devel rpm as the note mentioned, we just used the above libpam.so.0 that was installed with the normal pam rpm.

Another interesting feature of the Oracle eco system.

Gary