I often have to work with organizations that use PRINCE2 in project management, namely Government in the most part. In 2009 there was a major refresh of PRINCE2 and it has some great changes that simplify and improve the process. For those of you that have never come across it, PRINCE2 is a project management method, which is a tool to assist you run better projects, now I know a lot of people use and prefer the PMI/PMBOK approach and that is fine, just most of Australian government seems to have approached this with PRINCE2, probably because it originated in the UK government. Now I have developed a few PM skills over time and through the various places I have worked I have seen both PMBOK and PRINCE2 in action. Neither is good or bad just different. Many commercial organizations and the US seem to prefer PMBOK. Now back to the resource. Well it is in fact a group of resources and I found them through the PRINCE2 group on LinkedIn. It has a variety of training tools that would be an excellent resource for someone who was either going to do self study or going to do classroom based training to assist you in that training, either by providing a head start or as another supplement to your other training materiel. I think in all probability of you have some experience in projects or are already certified through PMI that you would find this a great resource to add PRINCE2 to your credentials

Here is the link PRINCE2 Group

See ya round

Image via Wikipedia

Peter

I recently installed  Checkpoint VPN-1 SecureClient software onto a system running XP SP3 with ZoneAlram Extreme Security installed. After running into an issues where WinSCP would run at 100% CPU utilization I decided to investigate. My initial investigation led me to deciding to remove the VPN-1 SecureClient. This was to prove to be a nightmare exercise. I removed the client or so I thought after uninstalling it and rebooted.

I then started getting an issue with BSOD DRIVER_IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and the vdatant.sys was apparently the culprit. I ended pointed to a couple of notes suggesting this was Zone Alarm. Easy enough I think just uninstall ZoneAlarm and reinstall it. No not quite, still getting these BSOD.

Of to do some more research and I come across a note to use Cpclean to get rid of VPN-1. No problems nice to have a clean up tool. Ran it said it was going to remove some registry keys, good I thought. Ran WnSCP and nope still not right 100CPU, it seems this was due to excessive packet inspection. Saga continues, ok remove ZoneAlarm again, ran CPClean still a problem. Yes I now had no network connection at all. The VPN-1 software had trashed my network stack.

Decided to install some diagnostics and they wanted to have some Windows Network tools SNMP installed. I tried to do that but I don’t have a copy of SP3 that it wanted.  Now I had a problem, I was not sure if I had just reinstalled a SP2 or SP1 version file and I was now getting random lockups. I grabbed some software on my MAC latest Drivers for this Network card and reinstalled the software and yeah I was back online but still unstable, I was getting random lockups.

Next step I did some research could I get my machine back to a state of having SP3 with all the latest updates. Oh yeah I found WindowsUpdateDownloader. Cool, wonderful tool I could now download all SP for my machine since SP3, I reinstalled SP3 and then downloaded all the windows updates and chronologically reinstalled them, about 60 or so. Well it looks like stability had returned. I then proceeded to run CPclean again and it said there were a few keys there for Checkpoint. Next I manually searched and removed from the registry any  remnants of the Checkpoint VPN-1 Software and SecureClient, a few different keyword searches uncovered the majority and  cleaned it out.

So no I felt my system was stable and Checkpoint VPN was gone, so test again and see if WinSCP either caused BSOD or caused high CPU. Yeah!! No issues present, file transferred normally and the system seemed OK. Next trick reinstall ZoneAlarm. Pretty straightforward its key with the license was still present so it automatically got going and after a couple of days it seems well again.

Clearly there should be a huge Warning from Checkpoint about installing its VPN software on the same OS that is running ZoneAlarm. Surely they test that sort of stuff.

Moral of the story you cant run VPN-1 on a system running ZoneAlarm if you have a need look into using VM’s to do the dirty work then you have the choice of having  a VPN-1 VM for that site.

All is good now so I am happy again but it lost me close to three days of full productivity cleaning up and reinstalling to rid the issues.

See ya round

Peter

The decision that was announced on the 23rd March 2011 to drop Itanium support for new development seems to have ruffled some feathers and is being taken as an anti competitive stance. Well this is probably a very long bow to draw. Oracle may have an agenda to force people to use Sun/Oracle hardware. This will only have one benefit and that will be for IBM as a database vendor with wider cross platform support. Customers who bought Oracle for its open platform availability that there is no vendor lock in probably didn’t buy it for all the right reasons. Of course it is also a pretty hard to argue that they are somehow shrinking the vendor options with Oracle supporting the database and other products on Linux of various flavours as well as hardware vendor of choice. I think many bought Oracle for its feathres and whilst cross platform has enhanced its power as a vendor its not the key reason businesses bought it

Itanium has had a troubled history and as a result probably never reached the market penetration it might have had. I can remember going to a HP roadshow back around1998, where HP touted the replacement of the current PA-Risc architecture with these new fancy Itaniums. Unfortunately they had many performance issues in the early days that took the gloss of the platform. I think it was being touted as a Alpha killer. This never eventuated and the Alpha only got killed when DEC was sold to Compaq who on sold to HP who sold the Alpha to Intel and then Intel after studying it scrapped it as they had already made an investment in Itanium.

So this now looks like the end of Itanium and it is probably a lesson to the world on outsourcing. HP outsourced the chip which was a flagship product in effect and now suffer the consequences of this decision. Without Microsoft and Oracle on the platform that takes a lot out of the software choices for that platform.

Image via CrunchBase

I suspect it will take more than ten years to see its end and the last one to end its life in business.

So is it anti-competitive as it pulls the rug from under HP well no not really unless you some how equate databases as only being from Oracle and that means you haven’t looked very deep in the market. HP will still have Oracle on Intel. IBM still have Oracle on P series and with the choice of any Intel vendor with Windows or Linux there is little place for calling it anti-competitive.

I am sure Larry will sell HP some Sparcs for a few servers if they want them

See ya round

Peter

• Practical Analysis: Oracle Vs. HP — Who’s Got Your Back? (informationweek.com)
• Oracle on Intel Itanium: HP misleading customers (zdnet.com)

As per another post I created my OEL 5 and Centos 5 installations. I have run into a problem I am working through that plagued me with both Centos and OEL. The problem I encountered was that I had originally decided to use various partitions ,eg Unix, Oracle code, database files and other stuff.

I created three virtual disks for VM during the installation and then started installing the OS, in both Centos and OEL I was unable to manage those extra disks without crashing the installer at the point of configuring the disk layout. As the disks are for additional things that the OS did not require. I decided to not use them during the installation and then mount them and update the configuration past the OS installation. This is also not as straight forward to a Unix Linux person as the simple process if mounting the volume using “mount /dev/xdbc /oracle ” does not appear to functions. so next try fdisk and check the volume at that level. I found that the partition is not recognised as a valid partition. When I find an answer to this I will either post if warranted or update this entry.

“That’s easy” I think, change the partition with fdisk and set it as Linux partition type. Then mount it as ext3. Unfortunately it was not successful. In the interests of progressing other parts of my project I have simply rebuilt my vm for Oracle that is to run some testing databases as a 50Gb single partition. It is a test and my learning  environment after all so having to deal with OS issues due to me filling the file system will do just that teach me something.

So next problem arises disk issues with media, oh the fun of it.  I needed to mount an external drive on the server to allow me to install the database software from I found a note here to explain the process of finding and mounting a USB external drive to access in your Virtual Machines.

Working to get an Identity Management installation up and running using Oracle 11g Fusion Middleware and hit a stumbling block. You see I found an error code I cannot find any reference to when trying to get Oracle Internet Directory installed. It seems to be trying to find something of which I cannot seem to identify.  The error contains the error code INST-5145 This is caused by having firewalls and SE Linux enabled, it seems it couldn’t connect to some component to asses something and that breaks the installation process.

It is a little annoying that Oracle hasn’t published these installer errors anywhere, it would be good if they were available as a list in My Oracle Support. I have found a number of these INST errors in my attempts to build this test all caused by issues that are not shown as prerequisites, like 4gb RAM is an absolute minimum to get an installation Identity Management  running. I have come across a number of blogs relating to installing Identity Management (OIM) and I must be the luckiest guy around, because none of them it seems encountered any errors.

I have a beef about the installer as well, I have run into errors, caused by me for the most part, hey if you don’t break it how do you learn. The installer once you start configuring if it finds an error you need to go back and redo your configuration again, why can I not use the back button why only the retry, this seems a little silly to me, but hey I am only the guy trying to install it.

Some additional issues encountered are problems with Nodemanager doesn’t start during configuration, if this is supposed to be started why doesn the install guide say so.

There is a good one here to help with a real show stopper i had and that is the problem of running out of memory. Check out this “My Oracle Support” note [ID 865166.1] to get some very useful assistance. Until you are ready to go into some solid testing or production I would suggest you try altering the described parameters to suit your requirements getting the best out of a given set of physical resources.

So my recommendation for anyone trying to install OID use more than 4GB, it should save you finding out some things.

See ya round

Peter