Welcome to the Integryst WebCenter Interaction Blog! Here you'll find the latest in WCI (or, if you prefer, Plumtree Portal, AquaLogic User Interaction, ALUI, or WCI) news, tips, and tricks.
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May 19th, 2012 by Matt Chiste
When you have a dozen portal servers in an environment that need to be rebooted during Windows Updates, you occasionally find yourself on a Windows Server wondering when it was last rebooted.
Easy, just run:
net statistics server
Or, you could check the Event Log. Windows Server 2003 machines record their up-time every day at noon in the System Event Log:
Tags: command, up-time, Windows
Posted in Windows | No Comments »
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May 17th, 2012 by Matt Chiste
You’ve probably got monitors set up for your various portal servers and components, and are using those to track up-time of your servers. And you may even use an awesome tool like New Relic to track response times in addition to up-time.
But, if you don’t have or need anything fancy (or even if you do for that matter), one of the most common tweaks I recommend to customers prior to a Health Check is to turn on Response Time monitoring. By default, application servers like IIS or WebLogic don’t track how long they take to serve up a page, but it’s easy to turn that on for later analysis.
In IIS, you just turn on the “time-taken” header in the logs:
In Apache or other Java App Servers, use a line line this:
LogFormat "%{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t %p \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" \"%{Cookie}i\" %h %I %O %D" combined-withcookie
It’s the %D that logs the time taken in milliseconds – see the Apache Log documentation for details.
Either way, you should get a log line that looks like this:
- - - [14/Feb/2012:01:11:51 -0400] 80 "GET /portal/server.pt HTTP/1.1" 200 843 "http://portal/server.pt?space=Login" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.1)" "" 10.10.12.26 710 1133 17099
… where one of the items is milliseconds (or, in Apache’s case, microseconds) that were taken to process and serve the request. This is hugely valuable information for identifying which pages, communities, or content types are slowing you down.
Tags: logging, performance tuning
Posted in Best Practice, Logs | No Comments »
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May 13th, 2012 by Matt Chiste
I got a tip a couple months ago (thanks Brian Hak!) about a new Collab patch that “fixes the bulk upload” issue, and yes, it’s taken me this long to actually dig in a bit.
At first, I thought this was the same one I wrote about in February of last year – the IE8 Critical Fix. But, it turns out that this patch was released in May in 2011.
From the release notes in the patch called “Patch 12423316: WLS1034: UNDER JROCKIT, COLLABORATION PROJECT ACCESS FAILS WITH TREEUNMARSHALL“, these are the issues resolved. With the exception of the first one, everything else is the same as the February patch:
- Using JRockit with Weblogic Server 10.3.4 collaboration project access throws a TreeUnmrashall exception (12423316).
- WebEdit does not work on IE8. (9723488)
- Error in task submenu in IE8 (9712774)
- Cannot upload multiple files in Collab (9274372)
- Bulk upload JRE updated to 1.6 in order to support IE8 (8760280)
- Notifications should be sent from a fixed address for creation and deletion (9647426) This fix involves updates to both collab and notification components.
- Subscription to project overview causes conflicts with Immedate Subscriptions (8759642)
- Non gatewayed webedit does not work (9434805)
- File leak in Search Service during search index rebuild (11726008)
- Webcenter Collaboration notifications to large numbers of recipients fail (9484113)
So, sure, this patch from May of last year supersedes that one from February. What’s strange, though, is that the link I provided in the post last year no longer works. Shouldn’t it have a message that says “this is no longer the latest patch version”, or “click here to see a list of all critical fixes released for this product”? In fact, where IS the definitely list of all of Oracle’s critical fixes? Seriously, does ANYONE know?
Don’t get me started on Oracle’s BS monthly email about all their “critical patches”. In fact, maybe you should, ’cause I’m this close to writing a Wall of Shame Rant about that ridiculousness. I mean, really, WHO is possibly helped by this?
Either way, stay tuned here for some reviews of the new Collab 10gR4 version, which presumably contains these patches (although, not totally guaranteed given the strange release history).
Tags: Bulk Upload, Collaboration, haker, patches
Posted in Collaboration Server | No Comments »
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May 11th, 2012 by Matt Chiste
As a portal consultant, I’m often working on client servers using a domain account, and my local machine isn’t on the domain since I’m VPN’ing in remotely. But I need to change my passwords occasionally and can’t just use CTRL-ALT-DEL for that, since that key combination gets sent to my desktop.
To send CTRL-ALT-DEL to a remote desktop via RDP (Windows Remote Desktop), use CTRL-ALT-END in a Remote Desktop session to get the familiar password change dialog:
Fun fact: CTRL-ALT-DELETE is a Secure Attention Key, which basically means that unlike any other keystroke combination you can do (which applications, and therefore other malware, can intercept), it’s a special combination that only the OS is allowed to interact with.
Tags: passwords, RDP, Windows
Posted in Windows | No Comments »
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May 9th, 2012 by Matt Chiste
Lately I’ve found myself crafting all kinds of database queries for everything from monitoring to reporting, and I’ll be sharing many of those queries on this blog in the coming weeks. Today’s post answers a simple question: If a WebCenter Analytics service falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Or, more to the point, occasionally the Analytics Collector service keeps running (so many of your existing monitors don’t see it as “down”), but it stops recording data for one reason or another.
The trick is to create a monitor that basically says “let me know if no user logins have occurred in the past day”, because if nothing has been recorded, either the site you’re tracking sucks or the Analytics Collector is sucking. Using whatever tool you’d like (HP’s SiteScope is a popular one, and we use Function1′s Watcher on some sites), just create a monitor that runs the below query once per day, and notifies you if ZERO results are returned, which would indicate a problem with the collector:
select count(1)
from asfact_logins
where occurred > (getdate() - 1)
That way, you won’t have to explain to the boss why your Analytics report looks like this:
Tags: Analytics, database, monitoring
Posted in Analytics | No Comments »
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May 5th, 2012 by Matt Chiste
Years ago we featured some .NET Decompilers, which sparked a discussion about the cost of these tools (OK, it was just commenter Omid stating the Java equivalents were largely free).
Well, it’s time for a refresh on the .NET decompiler landscape – a new (to me at least) tool that I’ve used to successfully decompile and resolve issues with the Plumtree portal is Telerik’s JustDecompile. It’s as simple to use as the other tools we’ve featured and it’s free!
Tags: Cool Tools, decompilers
Posted in Cool Tools | No Comments »
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May 1st, 2012 by Matt Chiste
Even though ALUI Publisher didn’t get a refresh with WebCenter Interaction 10gR4 and is still at version 6.5, that doesn’t mean it’s not still a large part of your (aging) portal infrastructure.
Hat tip to Andrew Foster for this one – it seems that some of the pre-6.5 Publisher settings still work in Publisher 6.5. Specifically, if you’re having problems getting Publisher to load your custom styles from community-themes.txt when you create a new header portlet, or you see an error like the one below in Publisher Diagnostics, then you can use the old setting CommunityStyleSheetListURL to get Publisher to properly load it.
In other words, if you’re getting this:
… then you should create a line in content.properties to fix that error:
CommunityStyleSheetListURL= http://machine_name /imageserver/plumtree/common/public/css/community-themes.txt
… and your custom styles will then be available when creating Header portlets in WCI:
Tags: configuration, Publisher
Posted in Publisher | No Comments »
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April 27th, 2012 by Matt Chiste
The Knowledge Directory has always been an instrumental part of the Plumtree / ALUI / WebCenter stack, and several vendors – Integryst included – have made strides in enhancing its functionality over the years by providing a more Windows Explorer-like interface. Adaptive Layouts were nice for getting part of the way there, but until now, Oracle never had an AJAX-type solution.
With Neo, that all changes. The new Knowledge Directory portlet – part of the new Neo Portlet bundle – is a decent portlet that provides most of the expected functionality:
It even has a pretty solid configuration screen (for both admin and personal settings) to choose a base folder, properties that you’d like to have presented, and some formatting options:
You’ll find a special offer after the break if you’re so inclined…
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Knowledge Directory, Neo, neoportlet, portlets
Posted in Integration, Knowledge Directory, WebCenter Interaction | No Comments »
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April 23rd, 2012 by Matt Chiste
When Neo (10gR4, for those who are counting) came out (and then REALLY came out), word on the street was that there were 200 “bug fixes”, but we never got official word of what those work, like we’ve seen in the past.
I wish I could tell you in the four intervening months that I’ve seen such a document, but sadly, I still haven’t. It does seem, though, that since then, some updates were made to Oracle’s What’s New section of the release notes, so, you know, there’s that.
Officially, as of this writing here are the latest updates:
- Support for .NET 3.5 and Java 1.6
- Support for Intel 64-bit on Windows and Linux
- New adaptive tags supporting multi-level menus and trees, adaptive tag caching, higher level logic tags, and adaptive tag sample portlet
- Advanced search adaptive layout page
- Support for displaying Pagelet Producer pagelets in Oracle WebCenter Interaction
- New KD portlet
- Tagging Engine
- Native RSS integration
- New password management features
In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be diving into some of these features, as well as Collaboration Server and any other new stuff we can find. Stay tuned!
Tags: 10gR4, installation, Neo, WCI
Posted in WebCenter Interaction | No Comments »
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January 12th, 2012 by Matt Chiste
So, now that we’ve got WebCenter Interaction 10gR4 downloaded, you’re probably wondering how things look. Well, because it’s just a point release (and probably the LAST one), don’t expect much in the way of dramatically new stuff.
The installation process for the portal will be pretty familiar to those of you who’ve done any before, although there are a LOT of new options, as Oracle has chosen to bundle together most of the new stuff into three uber-installers (Portal, Collab, Analytics).
The portal installer in particular really throws in everything and the kitchen sink – even things like the IDK and Documentum Crawlers are all bundled in there:
Details after the break. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 10gR4, installation, Neo, WCI
Posted in WebCenter Interaction | Comments Off
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