Archive for July, 2010
Mass Agent Deployments
This is just a short update on the prerequisites, especially firewall port requirements that you will need to ensure agent deployments in Enterprise Manager Grid Control work correctly. This is not well documented in the install manual. Chapter 9 of the advanced installation guide contains the basic requirements.
It however misses out some basics. This method of deployment does the following:
1) ssh and ping the target and run some prerequisite checks.
2) scp the install across
3) ssh across and run the install
4) do target discovery
5) setup secure comms.
Consequently the following needs to be allowed through your firewalls.
ssh, ping, oms to agent comms, agent to oms comms on both the secure and unsecured upload ports.
In addition we found that you’ll need to edit userPaths.properties in $EM_DOMAIN/sysman/prob/resources for the correct Linux paths to sudo and rsh etc to be picked up.
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Technology isn’t the answer
Sometimes I wonder about our industry. We seem so keen to promote silver bullets and technology solutions to what are at heart human problems. This blog post by an excellent technologist at Oracle rather illustrates the problem for me.
The British security services, rather embarrasingly, hired a spook who turned out to be guided by voices in his head. He set about obtaining information on how the security services work and tried to sell it to the Dutch.
The parting shot from the blog
Of course this story could have been very different if those documents had been protected with an information rights management solution like Oracle’s. Oracle IRM is a perfect technology to allowing national security agencies to protect their most valuable data
Of course the story would have been different. He’d have used non-technological techniques. Or different technological techniques. IRM is a very clever and very useful technology, but when your problem is essentially a human resources one – “How on earth did we get the recruitment so wrong” – then encrypting documents is hardly going to change the fundamental problem. Sadly it may, and likely will, lead people to have over-confidence in their security.
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Backward Compatability
Backward Compatability is a very big technological driver. Especially for software companies like Oracle that have customers with a large installed base of users who rely on expensive functionality that they have purchased. When companies invest in software it is usually for very good business reasons and they expect that software to carry on doing at least what it did in the previous version as time progresses.
In 2006 I argued (www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com/ManageabilityManifesto.pdf) that Oracle Corp had removed some existing functionality from Standard Edition users of the database product by making certain features that had previously been available in a management pack for SE users (and the base product for that matter). I started a petition (that had very little effect, the relevant product manager said they preferred to hear direct from customers – presumably in sales meetings – and not from users and advocates of the product ) and generally made a bit of a fuss.
Four years later and the same team have committed a similar error again. If you visit http://www.oracle.com/oms/enterprisemanager11g/webcast-067871.html you can hear Charles Phillips and others talking about Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g. What’s frustrating for me is that some of what is described (for example the management packs for Oracle E-Business Suite described in BreakOut Session 1 @8:33 , but especially 10:14-12:44) exists in the 10g product, but will not install on and is not certified for 11g. I can’t speak to whether an upgraded installation will work correctly, but I’m not encouraged. It turns out that this subject was covered on Stephen Chan’s excellent blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2010/06/oem_11g_amp_acmp_plans.html. It rather looks as if to get features that were working in 10g Enterprise Manager, you’ll have to wait for a future release of the management pack – and moreover that possibly this project has only just started.