Managing Oracle9iAS with EM Oracle Application Server Tips by Burleson Consulting

The Oracle9iAS Enterprise Manager Console is the central management component for Oracle9iAS.  The core of Oracle9iAS EM is the EM console page.  From the EM central console you can manage most of the areas of Oracle9iAS on multiple servers.

If you have installed the infrastructure component of Oracle9iAS (iasdb database repository), then the default EM console page will be the EM Farm page.   The Farm page is the highest level of the EM pages and is used to administer all instances within your Oracle9iAS configuration.  As a quick review, let make sure that we understand the Oracle9iAS component hierarchy, from the bottom-up:

• Instances - In Oracle9iAS, each J2EE app server or infrastructure is called an ?instance? (not to be confused with an Oracle database instance, which is quite different). 

• Clusters - In Oracle9iAS a ?cluster? is an arbitrary collection of instances. 

• Farms - In Oracle9iAS, a ?farm? is a collection of instances and clusters that comprise your Oracle9iAS system and share a common repository database (iasdb). 

As we see, Oracle9iAS defines a hierarchy of components, instances, clusters and farms. Each farm may have many clusters, each cluster may have many instances and each instance may have many Oracle9iAS components.  It is your job as the Oracle9iAS administrator to configure your components, instances clusters and farms according to the processing requirements of your application.

The purpose of the Oracle9iAS EM Farm page is to sever as the master console and display summary information about each instance and cluster within the farm (Figure 1.13)

Figure 13: The main EnterpriseManager console screen for Oracle9iAS

Remember, each instance within the Farm page is an independent J2EE app server or an infrastructure, and the farm page allows you to drill-down and see the details for each instance using the EM instance manager page.  Using the EM farm page you can also define new clusters and assign instances to clusters.  In Oracle9iAS parlance a ?standalone? instance is a J2EE app server, belonging to a Farm, which has not been assigned to a cluster.  A cluster is two or more identically configured app server instances.  To assign an instance to a cluster, you simply choose it and click the ?join cluster? button.

Next, let?s step-down one level and look at what we see when we drill-down into an instance and see the EM instance manager page.

Oracle9iAS instance manager home page

The Oracle9iAS instance manager page is somewhat of a misnomer.  To the Oracle DBA, an instance is a running Oracle database, while to the Oracle9iAS administrator an instance refers to a J2EE app server or an infrastructure within their Oracle9iAS farm.

For each instance, the Oracle9iAS Instance Manager page allows you to manage all of the Oracle9iAS components.  When you select a server from the OEM farm page you get the Instance Manager page with details on all components on that server (Figure 1.14).  The top of the page displays the host name and status of the server.  We also see CPU and RAM memory usage for the server. The bottom half of the page shows all of the Oracle9iAS components on that server. 

For each component we see the current status (up or down), the start time for the component and the relative amount of CPU and RAM usage for each component. By selecting a component and clicking the management buttons you can start, stop, enable, disable and configure each component on the instance.  Let?s take a look at the links on this page. 

• Infrastructure button ? The infrastructure link allows you to associate App Servers (?instances?) components with database schemas to include associating a component to a schema in a database that is not in the farm?s infrastructure. This allows you to share schemas across instances that do not belong to a particular farm.

• Logs button - On the top-right of this page we can press the ?logs? link to see all of the log files for each component.

• J2EE deployment button ? In the home tab we can click the ?J2EE Applications? to see a list of all J2EE applications that are deployed on this server.

• Ports button ? This link displays the port numbers for each server component and allows you to change the port number for any component on the instance (server).

Figure 14: The EM console Instance screen for Oracle9iAS

While the EM Console is a popular way of managing Oracle9iAS, we must remember that Oracle9iAS also provides a wealth of command-line utilities.  Let?s do a quick review of the Oracle9iAS command line utilities.

Managing Oracle9iAS with command-line interface

Many experienced Oracle9iAS administrators prefer to use the command-line interface instead of EM. Remember, at the lowest level EM generates the commands and parameters for Oracle9iAS control files, and knowledgeable Oracle9iAS administrators do not need a command and parameter generation features of EM because they already know the commands and parameters.

The commands line interfaces are spread across many file locations and you will find Oracle9iAS command-line programs in the following directories on your operating system:

- $ORACLE_HOME/bin/
- $ORACLE_HOME/dcm/bin/
- $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/home/
- $ORACLE_HOME/ldap/bin/
- $ORACLE_HOME/ldap/odi/admin/
- $ORACLE_HOME/oca/bin/
- $ORACLE_HOME/opmn/bin/
- $ORACLE_HOME/portal/admin/plsql/sso/
- $ORACLE_HOME/sso/lib/
- $ORACLE_HOME/uddi/lib/
- $ORACLE_HOME/upgrade/
- $ORACLE_HOME/wireless/bin/

NOTE: To locate all of the command-line programs you should always include these directories in your $PATH variable to ensure that you locate all of the Oracle9iAS command utilities.  In UNIX, you can place the following command in your .profile (ksh), .cshrc (csh), or bash.

The Oracle command line utilities will be mentioned throughout this text, but let?s just take a quick tour so you can see how the command line interface is used to manage Oracle9iAS.  Table 1.1 shows all 59 of the command line executables with Oracle9iAS.

Category	Command	Usage
9iAS	iasua.sh	This is the upgrade assistant executable.
DCM	dcmctl	The distributed configuration manager is for managing Oracle9iAS components.
Discoverer	eulbuilder.jar	This is the Oracle9iAS Discoverer end-user-layer Java command-line interface.
DMS	dmstool	The dmstool is used for viewing performance metrics.
Forms	fplsqlconv90	The fplsqlconv90 executable us used to update PL/SQL for Forms6i
Forms	ifbld90	The ifbld90 executable is used to start Forms Developer
Forms	ifcmp90	The ifcmp90 executable starts the Forms Compiler.
Forms	iff2xml90	This will traverse a module object hierarchy and produce an XML representation.
Forms	ifweb90	The ifweb90 will allow you to preview a form in a Web browser.
Forms	ifxml2f90	This will take a Forms XML format and convert it back into a module.
Forms	ifxmlv90	This is the XML validator to validate .xml files against the Forms XML Schema.
J2EE	ojspc	This is the JSP back precompiler.
J2EE	admin.jar	This tool is only used in the sample OC4J Stand alone installation. Do not use this command.
J2EE	jazn.jar	This jar file manages both XML-based and LDAP-based JAAS data.
LDAP	ldapadd	This is the OID add utility for adding entries, their object classes, and attributes.
LDAP	ldapaddmt	Just like ldapadd, but with support for multiple threads for adding entries concurrently.
LDAP	ldapbind	The ldapbind determines if you can authenticate a client to a server.
LDAP	ldapcompare	Compares your attribute values with an OID entry.
LDAP	ldapdelete	Remove entries from OID.
LDAP	ldapmoddn	Modifies the DN or RDN of an Oracle Internet Directory entry.
LDAP	ldapmodify	Modifies OID attributes
LDAP	ldapmodifymt	Modify several OID entries concurrently.
LDAP	ldapsearch	Search and retrieve specific OOID entries.
LDAP	bulkdelete.sh	Delete a whole OID sub-tree.
LDAP	bulkload.sh	Creates OID  entries from data residing in or created by other applications.
LDAP	catalog.sh	Add and delete OID catalog entries.
LDAP	hiqpurge.sh	Move OID changes from the human intervention queue to the purge queue.
LDAP	hiqretry.sh	Move OID changes from the human intervention queue to the retry queue.
LDAP	oidstats.sh	Analyzes ODS schema objects to estimate statistics.
LDAP	remtool	Used with a OID replication failure.
OCA	ocactl	The Oracle9iAS Certificate Authority administration tool.
OEM utility	emctl	Starts, stop, and manages security for OEM.
OID	bulkmodify	Modify a large number OID entries.
OID	dipassistant	Used with the Oracle Directory Integration and Provisioning platform.
OID	ldifmigrator	Migrate data from application-specific repositories into Oracle Internet Directory.
OID	ldifwrite	Converts OID data to LDIF.  This makes that information available for loading into a new node in a replicated directory or into another node for backup storage.
OID	oidctl	Start and stop Oracle Internet Directory.
OID	oidmon	Manage OID processes.
OID	oidpasswd	Change the OID database password.
OID	oidprovtool	Administer provisioning profile entries in OID directory.
OID	oidreconcile	Synchronize Oracle Internet Directory entries.
OID	resetiASpasswd.sh	Reset the internal password that instances use to authenticate themselves with OID.  It resets the password to a randomly generated password.
OID	schemasync	Synchronizes schema elements between OID  and third-party LDAP directories.
OID	stopodis.sh	Starts the directory integration and provisioning server without using oidctl executable.
OPM	opmnctl	Start, stop, and get status on OPMN-managed processes.  This is the main tool for starting and stopping an instance.
OSSA	ossoca.jar	Configures additional languages for Oracle9iAS Single Sign-On.
Reports	rwbuilder	Invokes the Reports Builder.
Reports	rwcgi	Translates and delivers information between HTTP and the Reports Server.
Reports	rwclient	Parses and transfers a command line to the specified (or default) Reports Server.
Reports	rwconverter	Converts report definitions or PL/SQL libraries from one storage format to another.
Reports	rwrun	Runs a report using the Oracle9iAS Reports Services in-process server.
Reports	rwserver	Invokes the Reports Server.
SSO	ssocfg.sh	Updates host, port, and protocol of SSO URL.
SSO	ssooconf.sql	Points SSO to a different OID.
SSO	ossoreg.jar	This is the mod_osso registration tool.
Web cache	webcachectl	Manages web cache processes, including the administration server process, cache server process, and auto-restart process.
Web Services	uddiadmin.jar	Managse the UDDI registry.
Wireless	portalRegistrar.sh	Reregisters the mobile gateway parameter with Oracle9iAS Portal.
Wireless	reRegisterSSO.sh	Reregisters the Wireless Single Sign-On partner application with the Single Sign-On server.

Table 1 ? Oracle9iAS command-line utilities

Knowing these commands and their parameters for Oracle9iAS is very useful for automating Oracle9iAS administration functions and creating batch scripts.  These Oracle9iAS commands can easily be placed into scripts (shell scripts in Linux and UNIX) that can be executed to automate routine Oracle9iAS management tasks.

While each product with Oracle9iAS has control files, there are three main command-line interfaces within Oracle9iAS:

opmctl ? This is the control interface for the Oracle9iAS Process Management Notification (OPM) component.  The opmctl interface is located at $ORACLE_HOME/opmn/bin/opmctl.  The opmctl interface provides a startall and stopall argument that will manage all of the Oracle9iAS server processes.

dcmctl - This is the control interface for the Oracle9iAS Distributed Configuration Management (DCM) component.  The dcmctl interface is located at $ORACLE_HOME/dcm/bin/dcmctl.

ecmctl ? This is the Enterprise manager console utility.  The ecmctl executable is located in $ORACLE_HOME/bin/ecmctl.  It is used for managing the OEM agents, changing OEM passwords, starting the OEM console and other miscellaneous tasks.

These command-line interfaces are critical for Oracle9iAS administrative scripts.  Let?s take a look at how command line interfaces are used as scripts.

Using scripts to manage Oracle9iAS

You can automate many areas of Oracle9iAS administration using scripts.  Here is an example of a command list to start the iasdb database, the listener, the infrastructure instance, a midtier instance and the Enterprise Manager website on both instances.

echo Setting Env for Infrastructure
source envInfra.sh
echo Starting Listener
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl start
echo Starting Database
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus /nolog<<EOF
connect / as sysdba
startup
EOF
echo Starting all opmnctl controlled processes
$ORACLE_HOME/opmn/bin/opmnctl startall
echo Starting the EM website
#$ORACLE_HOME/bin/emctl start em
echo Setting Env for MidTier Instance
source envMidtier.sh
echo Starting all opmnctl controlled processes
$ORACLE_HOME/opmn/bin/opmnctl startall
echo Starting the EM website
#$ORACLE_HOME/bin/emctl start em
echo Startup Completed

By themselves, the command list is not very useful, but it becomes very powerful when embedded into a shell script. The source envMidtier.sh  statement changes the ORACLE_HOME environmental variable.  Each instance or Oracle9iAS must be installed it it?s own ORACLE_HOME.  This is covered in the Chapter 2. Because The Oracle9iAS command line utilities exist in many locations, it is critical that you set-up your OS environment so that your scripts will be able to locate all of the utilities.  Here are examples of the proper PATH commands for UNIX and Windows.  These are normally placed in the startup shell script to be executed at sign-on time.

UNIX PATH setup
ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/9.2.0
export ORACLE_HOME
PATH=.:$PATH:.;$ORACLE_HOME/dcm/bin/:$ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/home/:$ORACLE_HOME/ldap/bin/:$ORACLE_HOME/ldap/odi/
admin/:$ORACLE_HOME/oca/bin/:$ORACLE_HOME/opmn/bin/:$ORACLE_HOME/portal/admin/plsql/sso/:$ORACLE_HOME/sso/
lib/:$ORACLE_HOME/uddi/lib/:$ORACLE_HOME/upgrade/:$ORACLE_HOME/wireless/bin/

Windows PATH setup

Set ORACLE_HOME=c:\oracle\ora92
SETPATH=.;$PATH;%ORACLE_HOME%\dcm\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\j2ee\home\;%ORACLE_HOME%\ldap\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\ldap\odi\
admin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\oca\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\opmn\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\portal\admin\plsql\sso\;%ORACLE_HOME%\sso\
lib\;%ORACLE_HOME%\uddi\lib\;%ORACLE_HOME%\upgrade\;%ORACLE_HOME%\wireless\bin\

Once we have established the PATH variable we are able to create shell script that can be submitted in batch mode (in UNIX with the nohup command) to automate Oracle9iAS administrative tasks.  For example, an Oracle9iAS management shell script could be scheduled in the UNIX crontab to perform a scheduled shutdown of all Oracle9iAS services.

Of course, the PATH variable is only a part of an Oracle9iAS script, and the complete environment including ORACLE_BASE, ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID must be enabled.  The env.ksh script shows a common environmental setting for Oracle9iAS command scripts.  Note that $ORACLE_HOME is set to ORACLE_BASE/midtier for mid-tier command scripts and ORACLE_BASE/infra for infrastructure command scripts.  Every Oracle9iAS Instance must be installed in a unique ORACLE_HOME and startup/shutdown scripts must set the environment variables for that instance.

env.sh
#!/bin/ksh
export ORACLE_BASE=/private/ias
# Use this ORACLE_HOME for midtier applications
#export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/midtier
# Use this ORACLE_HOME for infra applications
export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/infra
SETPATH=.;$PATH;%ORACLE_HOME%\dcm\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\j2ee\home\;%ORACLE_HOME%\ldap\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\ldap\odi\
admin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\oca\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\opmn\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\portal\admin\plsql\sso\;%ORACLE_HOME%\sso\
lib\;%ORACLE_HOME%\uddi\lib\;%ORACLE_HOME%\upgrade\;%ORACLE_HOME%\wireless\bin\
export ORACLE_SID=iasdb
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/lib
#export DISPLAY=tor:2.0
echo ORACLE_HOME : $ORACLE_HOME
echo ORACLE_SID  : $ORACLE_SID
echo DISPLAY     : $DISPLAY
echo Set PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Here is a script to submit when there is a problem with OHS and you need to re-start it.  Some Oracle9iAS administrators place Apache user-exit code to automate the bouncing of the OHS.  For example, if an external connection fails to attach to an OHS listener, after 10 seconds the following code could be automatically invoked to bounce OHS.

bounce_ohs.ksh
#*****************************************************************
# Copyright (c) 2003 by Donald K. Burleson
#
#*****************************************************************
# Exit if no first parameter $1
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
   echo "ERROR: Please pass a valid ORACLE_SID to this script"
   exit 99
fi
# Validate Oracle
TEMP=`cat /etc/oratab|grep \^$1:|cut -f1 -d':'|wc -l`
tmp=`expr TEMP`            # Convert string to number
if [ $tmp -ne 1 ]
then
   echo
   echo "ERROR: Your input parameter $1 is invalid.  Please Retry"
   echo
   exit 99
fi

if [ `whoami` != 'oracle' ]
then
   echo "Error: You must be oracle to execute the script.  Exiting."
   exit
fi
# First, we must set the environment . . . .
export ORACLE_BASE=/private/ias
# Use this ORACLE_HOME for midtier applications
#export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/midtier
# Use this ORACLE_HOME for infra applications
export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/infra
SETPATH=.;$PATH;%ORACLE_HOME%\dcm\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\j2ee\home\;%ORACLE_HOME%\ldap\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\ldap\odi\
admin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\oca\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\opmn\bin\;%ORACLE_HOME%\portal\admin\plsql\sso\;%ORACLE_HOME%\sso\
lib\;%ORACLE_HOME%\uddi\lib\;%ORACLE_HOME%\upgrade\;%ORACLE_HOME%\wireless\bin\
export ORACLE_SID=iasdb
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/lib
#export DISPLAY=tor:2.0
#************************************************************
#  Execute the DCM commands to bounce the OHS
#************************************************************
$ORACLE_HOME/dcm/bin/dcmctl stop -ct ohs
$ORACLE_HOME/dcm/bin/dcmctl start -ct ohs
$ORACLE_HOME/dcm/bin/dcmctl start -co OC4J_Portal

As we can see, these shell scripts with embedded Oracle9iAS commands are extremely useful for automatic Oracle9iAS administration.  As each component is discussed in later chapters, detailed scripts will be introduced to assist with the administration of that component.  Here are some other examples of commands that the Oracle9iAS administrator can place inside scripts.

Let?s take a quick look at Oracle9iAS commands that are used to perform frequent Oracle9iAS administrative functions.

This is an excerpt from "Oracle 10g Application Server Administration Handbook" by Don Burleson and John Garmany.