9 Oracle9iAS Portal

This chapter discusses the following topics:

• Section 9.1, "General Issues and Workarounds"

9.1 General Issues and Workarounds

This section describes general issues and their workarounds for Oracle9iAS Portal.

9.1.1 Problems Logging in to Oracle Portal when a DB Characterset Other than the Default is Used

If you install the infrastructure with a DB Characterset other than the default (UTF8), the following error may occur when you login to Oracle Portal:

??: servlet ??????????java.io.IOException: Unsupported character encoding: "Error"

The workaround is as follows:

1. Open $IAS_HOME/Apache/modplsql/dads.conf

2. After the line PlsqlNLSLanguage AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8 , add the following line:

   PLsqlCGIEnvironmentList REQUEST_IANA_CHARSET=<language>
   

   For example, Simplified Chinese:

   PLsqlCGIEnvironmentList REQUEST_IANA_CHARSET=GBK
   

   For example, Korean:

   PLsqlCGIEnvironmentList REQUEST_IANA_CHARSET=EUC-KR
   

3. Clear the cache directories:

   $cd $IAS_HOME/Apache/modplsql/cache/session 
   $ rm -r * 
   $cd cd $IAS_HOME/Apache/modplsql/cache/plsql 
   $ rm -r * 
   

4. Restart all the Oracle9iAS services on the middle tier, i.e. opmn.

5. Clear your Browser cache, i.e. delete both objects and files.

9.1.2 Installing Multiple Mid-tiers for a Single Portal Repository

If you want to install multiple mid-tiers to connect to a single Portal repository, you must perform some additional steps to achieve the configurations involving Load Balancers as described in the Oracle Portal Configuration Guide.

The Oracle Portal Configuration Guide, section "Configuring Multiple Middle-Tiers to Use the Same Infrastructure, Oracle9iAS Portal and OID" indicates that:

"Every Oracle9iAS Portal middle-tier installation drops and recreates the Portal users in OID. This means that the Oracle9i Application Server instance password of the last run middle-tier installation should be used for Portal runtime access."

This is no longer correct, i.e. the mid-tier installation does not drop the entries in OID before attempting to install them. This provides a precaution against inadvertently losing data that should not be deleted. This may result in benign errors indicating that the LDAP server raised constraint violations when attempting to add the new entries. A side effect of this, is that the password for the portal application entry in OID (stored in the Portal repository) gets updated to a new random value, but the entry will not have been created in OID. As a result, the passwords will need to be re-synchronized after running the subsequent middle-tier installations.

Note: In a multiple mid-tier configuration, the Portal runtime access password is the OracleiAS instance password of the first mid-tier installation.

To synchronize the passwords:

1. Connect to the Portal schema from SQL*Plus.

2. Run the script $ORACLE_HOME/portal/admin/plsql/wwc/secappwd.sql

   This script takes two parameters:

   • OID administrator's Distinguished Name - pass in as "cn=orcladmin"

   • OID administrator's password - the password with which the administrator can connect to the OID server.

For example, you can run it as

  @secappwd "cn=orcladmin" welcome1 

On successful completion the following message is displayed: "The application password has been synchronized".

After running this script, please click the "Account Info" link to make sure the problem has been fixed. You should be able to see the logged in user's account information.

9.1.3 Getting the Portal Schema Password

As mentioned above, the script must be run in the Portal schema. This requires the Portal schema password and it can be obtained via the following query into OID using the ldapsearch command line utility:

ldapsearch -h oidhost -p oidport -D 'cn=orcladmin' -w orcladmin_password -b 'cn=IAS Infrastructure Databases,cn=IAS,cn=Products,cn=OracleContext' -s sub '(&(objectclass=orclResourceDescriptor)(orclresourcename=PORTAL))'orclpasswordattribute 

This returns the dn and orclpasswordattribute of the Portal schema entry. Use the orclpasswordattribute value to log into the Portal schema and run the password synchronization script.

9.1.4 Real Application Cluster (RAC) Installation

After installing the Portal Repository into a Real Application Cluster (RAC), the database must be restarted for Portal to work correctly. If you do not restart the database, you may see errors reported by modplsql of the form:

ORA-00942: table or view does not exist.