Ahmed Aboulnaga - Chronicles of Technology

Oracle Support Chat "powered by OCI Generative AI" is garbage

When I log in to the OCI console, the region on the top bar is always defaulting to "US West (Phoenix)". We have no resources in that region.

Functionize

Creating your first Functionize functional test

This post describes how to create a simple test case in Functionize for first-timers. These instructions are is based on Functionize V.5.3.24.3. Install the Functionize Extension

Jenkins

Installing Jenkins (zip version)

These instructions are quick and easy to follow steps for installing Jenkins (the zip version). It requires Tomcat, which in turn requires JDK. Instructions here are specific to Linux, but

OCI

Unable to add statement to 'Tenant Admin Policy' in OCI

I've been with OCI over 10 years, from the early days of their Gen1 cloud. So I've seen a lot in the journey of changes. One

OCI

Cloud resources and services no longer showing up on OCI console

Our OCI services have been working fine for years. They are used to host a few blog platforms, websites, development environments, and other odd services. A few months ago, none

Terratest

Some common solutions to Terratest Go test errors

This post provides a few resolutions to some Terratest errors encountered. Problem: You get a go: cannot find main module error as shown when running a go test: ahmed@devhost:

Eclipse

Eclipse pom.xml error "Downloading external resources is disabled"

I am using the most recent Eclipse IDE build id 20231201-2043 and created a barebones Maven project. However, out-of-the-box there is an error in the pom.xml file. Problem: Here in the pom.xml file you can see an error: When hovering over the

OCI

HTTP 400 Bad Request when calling OCI REST due to "Unable to parse message body"

I was able to successfully use the instructions in a blog post titled Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) REST call walkthrough with curl written by the Oracle A-Team to call an OCI REST service to create an Autonomous Database without using oci-curl. I was able

Selenium

Setting up Selenium/Java to test Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

This post describes how to set up Selenium and run a test case to authenticate with multi-factor authentication (MFA). By following these instructions, you can use Selenium and Java to

SSH

Putty error "PuTTY key format too new"

I recently received a "PuTTY key format too new" error when trying to SSH into one of my cloud VMs. Simply download the latest version of Putty from https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html and you should be

Git

My Git Cheat Sheet

# Clone from remote repo ssh-keygen -t rsa # Then copy this SSH key to GitLab git clone git@scm.revelationtech.com:soa/oracle-soa.git # Identify yourself as author git config --global user.name "ahmed" git config --global user.email ahmed@revelationtech.com git

Coherence

Applying Coherence patch 35122398 to JDeveloper 12c

When I was issued a client laptop, an Oracle Coherence vulnerability was reported as part of the local Oracle JDeveloper 12.2.1.4 installation on Windows. This blog walks through the patching process. 1. Navigate to Oracle Support and download the Oracle Coherence

WSO2 API Manager

Getting "Cannot remove the API" in WSO2 API Manager

I tried to delete an API in the WSO2 API Manager Publisher at https://hostname:9443/publisher/ but received the error Cannot remove the API as active subscriptions exist (see screenshot below). To delete this API, navigate to the WSO2 API Manager Developer Portal

OCI

Resolving OCI Management Agent installation error

Problem Getting "Error: Transaction failed" when installing the Oracle Management Agent which is downloaded from the OCI console. These are the steps I performed: 1. Navigate to "Observability & Management", then click on "Management Agent" 2. Click on

SQL*Plus

Using the SQL*Plus Instant Client

Now that you have the Oracle SQL*Plus Instant Client installed, here's the quickest way to start using it. (Installation instructions on this blog post.) # Set the environment variables to your local installation export SQLPLUS_HOME=/u01/sqlplus/instantclient_21_5 export

BPEL

Cheat sheet for XSL transformation

I'm really publishing this blog post for myself as a future reference. :) This .xsl file (aka XSL transformation file) contains perhaps 90% of everything I generally use in my Oracle SOA development projects. Here is the file in its entirety (I'

Oracle Fusion Middleware

Not getting the "Sign In" button on the Oracle Fusion Middleware EM Console? Try this

Quite a few times I've opened up the Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control 12c console and the prompt for the user name and password is right there, but not the Sign In button (see screenshot). Where's the "Sign

BPEL

EMAIL activity in Oracle BPEL does not support single quotes

During compilation of an Oracle SOA BPEL project, I ran into an error related to the EMAIL activity. Problem: I received an error invalid syntax when building the project, but the error message did not tell me what the issue exactly was: Error(782)

JDeveloper

Testing an XSL transformation mapping in Oracle JDeveloper 12c

So you developed a somewhat complicated XSL transformation in your Oracle SOA/BPEL project. But how do you go about testing this? Traditionally, we deploy the project to the SOA server, conduct a test of the end-to-end process, see what failed, and go back

WebLogic

Getting JPS-01050 when starting WebLogic (cannot open wallet)

When starting up WebLogic after a network outage, we received the following exception: oracle.security.jps.JpsException: JPS-01050: Opening of wallet based credential store failed. Reason java.io.IOException at oracle.security.jps.internal.config.OpssCommonStartup.preStart(OpssCommonStartup.java:423) at oracle.security.jps.

Performance

Creating a test file to test I/O performance

For the purpose of testing the performance of a cloud storage volume, I recently came across the xfs_mkfile command. This command creates a file called 30GigFile.out that is 30 GB in size: xfs_mkfile 30720m 30GigFile.out What I do is simply

APEX

Quickly installing APEX 22 and ORDS 22

Here are my quick notes on installing Oracle APEX Release 22.1 and Oracle REST Data Services 22.2. Extract Software 1. Set path. Use this path when installing APEX, ORDS, and Tomcat. Customize as necessary. export JAVA_HOME=/u01/oracle/jdk-18.0.1

APEX

Resetting the ORDS_PUBLIC_USER password for APEX 22 and ORDS 22

I recently installed Oracle APEX Release 22.1 and Oracle REST Data Services 22.2 (installation instructions here). All was working fine, but two days later when we navigated to the web console at http://hostname:8080/ords we received the following exception: Specifically,

Expedia

Why Expedia's slow killing of their desktop web experience is not a good thing

TRIGGER WARNING: This post may include frustration towards recent changes made by Expedia. Expedia has recently (in 2022) redesigned their user interface to provide a completely consistent experience between desktop

OEM

Monitor JMS queues through OEM 13c

If you have the WebLogic Management Pack for Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM), you can monitor a slew of metrics. Often, I am asked if OEM can monitor if there are pending messages in a WebLogic JMS queue or topic. The answer is "sort