More on Upstart

I did a couple of blog posts on Upstart - introducing it in my post Starting and stopping WebLogic automatically using Upstart and doing the same for OID.

I pointed a couple of people at those posts and they told me they wanted more. More explanation, more clarity, and more about how to use Upstart to boot the entire environment.

So in this post I'm going to show how to use Upstart to start the Oracle database, then (once the database is started) start OID and OVD, and only then start OAM and the other WebLogic services.

The first thing I did was convert my Oracle database startup from a SysV-style init script to Upstart. Colm Divilly did the heavy lifting for me and blogged his config file for Ubuntu. I took that and tweaked it for OEL.
This goes in /etc/init/oracledb.conf:

description  "Oracle Database"

# Based on blog post at
# https://cdivilly.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/ubuntu-upstart-script-for-oracle-database/

# The location of the Oracle install
env ORACLE_HOME=/home/oracle/database/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1
# The user to execute Oracle as
env ORACLE=oracle

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [016]

expect fork

pre-start script
    logger "Starting Oracle DB"
    su - $ORACLE -c "$ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstart $ORACLE_HOME"
end script

post-stop script
    logger "Stopping Oracle DB"
    su - $ORACLE -c "$ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbshut $ORACLE_HOME"
end script

Then /etc/init/oid.conf for OID, OVD and the WebLogic server where I run ODSM:

start on started oracledb
stop on stopping oracledb

# This is good for debugging purposes but it's a bad idea to leave
# this on long term.
#console output

# this starts OPMN, OID and OVD
pre-start script
    logger "pre-start for OID/OVD"
    /bin/su - oracle -c "/home/oracle/middleware/asinst_1/bin/opmnctl startall"
    logger "pre-start for OID/OVD complete"
end script

# and this stops them
post-stop script
    logger "pre-stop for OID/OVD complete"
    /bin/su - oracle -c "/home/oracle/middleware/asinst_1/bin/opmnctl stopall"
    logger "pre-stop for OID/OVD complete"
end script

# this is the AdminServer only:
exec /bin/su - oracle -- /home/oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/IDMDomain/bin/startWebLogic.sh

The important thing there is the "start on started oracledb" stanza. What that says in English is much as you would expect - "start this once the 'oracledb' service is started". The "stop on" does the same for when the database is being stopped; which will cause Upstart to stop OID and OVD before it tries to stop the database.

Upstart works out the dependencies automatically so no need to worry about numbers or pinging the database via sqlplus or tnsping.

The Upstart config for the OAM Server looks the much the same:
/etc/init/oamadminserver.conf

start on started oracledb
stop on stopping oracledb

exec /bin/su - oracle -- /home/oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/IAMDomain/bin/startWebLogic.sh

Enjoy.

OIM 11g Assets

Since the first 11g release, OIM engineering and product management teams have been working hard on field enablement. As part of this work, they created a wonderful set of reusable OIM customizations examples. Such components are called 'OIM assets'.

Among these great assets, you can find examples of approval workflow, event handler, scheduled task, UI customization, and others.  They can be used as learning assets; and they can be easily modified and deployed to your OIM environment to address some common use cases. Another nice thing is that there are examples for the three major releases of OIM 11g: 11.1.1.3, 11.1.1.5 and 11.1.2.0.

They can be found at Oracle Technology Network on this page. Have fun!

Unsolicited login with OAM 11gR2

In a previous post Chris Johnson has discussed unsolicited login with OAM 11g.

In OAM 11gR2 this functionality is supported out of the box and with little effort you can implement Unsolicited Login.

This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.

If you're interested to authenticate using unsolicited POST, please read on…

My Silly (and common) Mistake with the OAM Mobile and Social SDK on iOS

I recently created an iOS application using the OAM Mobile and Social SDK for iOS and got an error in my debugger output window:

2012-12-05 19:06:38.038 PiggyBank[24799:1303] -[__NSCFString OMJSONValue]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0xb2be000

This error appeared after the Application Profile was downloaded and I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong.

Turns out I'd forgotten one step after adding the SDK bits to the XCode project - I had forgot to add the linker flags "-ObjC -all_load" under Build Settings.

To fix this click on the Project, then click the Target, then click the "Build Settings" tab and find the "Other Linker Flags" row. Edit it and add -ObjC -all_load to whatever's already there. Here's a screen shot:

Those flags are needed whenever a new message (function) will be passed to existing class without extending it. Inside the bits of the M&S SDK NSString doesn't have OMJSONValue but the SDK will pass OMJSONValue to NSString, so those flags are needed to make it work.

Of course this is documented in a block marked "Important:" but I missed it and I'm guessing if you found this blog post via Google you did too!

Password Policy in OAM 11g R2

One of the features in the new 11G R2 (or 11.1.2) release of Oracle Access Manager that's been most eagerly anticipated is the support for password policy within the OAM product; that is, the ability for OAM itself to support a subset of password management processes without the need to use Oracle Identity Manager and LDAP Sync. In this post, I'd like to explore this functionality in a little more detail and also explore exactly which use cases are supported.

This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.