Goodbye vncserver, hello xming

For the last 8 or so years, the my team has been using a combination of vncserver on a utility box and vncclient on our desktops to draw xwindow objects from various hosts.

Typically you would see this while using the Oracle Universal Installer.

The following steps describe how to use Xming, a far simpler (and some would argue safer) method to perform the same function as vncserver:

1)  Download Xming: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming

2)  Install Xming, no special installation instructions.  (Screenshots of Xming are available:  http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/)

3)  Make sure Xming is running (You should see a swirly X in the system tray)

4)  Enable SecureCRT X11 Forwarding

    - Connect a session

    - Options -> Session Options

    - Select Remote/X11

    - Put a checkmark in "Forward X11 Packets"

    - OK

    - Logout and log back in for that session

5)  Try "xclock" from the command line, if it doesn't work...

    - Check DISPLAY environment variable.  It should be set to something like localhost:10.0

    - Is the X in the system tray?

    - Did you setup X11 forwarding?  Did you logout and log back in?

Cool stuff.  The three tier process (server -> utility host -> desktop) was difficult to explain much less troubleshoot.  

Oracle inventory problems

Had an interesting problem happen today while applying cpu2007apr to our grid control infrastructure.

After applying the cpu to the em app server, I started work on the patches, and ran into a brick wall while patching a db server.

A simple opatch lsinventory would fail, showing one of the homes that wasn't the agent home, then spitting out this set of errors:

Inventory load failed... OPatch cannot load inventory for the given Oracle Home.
Possible causes are:
   Oracle Home dir. path does not exist in Central Inventory
   Oracle Home is a symbolic link
   Oracle Home inventory is corrupted
LsInventorySession failed: OracleHomeInventory::load() gets null oracleHomeInfo

OPatch failed with error code 73

Oh no! The inventory is corrupted! Actually, it's not at all corrupted, I just did something stupid during the initial install of this box and haven't corrected it yet.

I've got two oraInventory's on this box. Which means I'm going to need to be very specific when identifying which oraInst.loc I'm using.

In this situation, I checked in the AGENT_HOME/oraInst.loc to locate the missing inventory, and then used that in the invPtrLoc command below:

[oracle@omsdb:/usr/users/oracle]# opatch lsinventory -detail \ 
     -invPtrLoc /u01/app/oracle/product/agent10g/oraInst.loc