Year: 2009

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

Juha Technical, Technical , 0 Comment

So have you ever tried to get Oracle Service Bus 10gR3, Oracle WebLogic Server 9.2.2 or 10gR3 to start up fast on a Linux (Oracle Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Linux or any other variant)? Takes a bit of time, hmm? Well, there is a reason for it and it is because of this (Bug ID: 6202721)not-a-bug bug in the JVM.

Essentially getting a random number from the system is done by querying the /dev/random or /dev/urandom device on the system. On a Windows box these “devices” default always to the CryptoAPI and that works fine. On Linux the /dev/random seeds the random numbers with an entropy pool which is all well and good. But say you are a server, especially a server that has not started the “services” yet – like an application server – you will not generate enough entropy to fill your pools for quite a while. This is because it is the network and disk I/O operations that make the entropy, and obviously you are not yet at the point where you will create any of that. So then the “really random randomness” of /dev/random becomes a hinderance rather than a benefit, because the startup times are a pain.

So this is where /dev/urandom steps in with its non-blocking and “less random randomness” (but still good enough randomness for most uses) goodness. Except for the “non-bug” of course. So there are many work-arounds to it, but I personally prefer changing the securerandom.source entry in the $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/security/java.security file to securerandom.source=file:/dev/./urandom. Now everything starts up like a dream, as it should.

Understanding Oracle SOA Suite documentation

Juha Uncategorized , 0 Comment

So, got wind of the new (beta) documentation about the Oracle Fusion Middleware and there are quite a few interesting documents there. Now the docs are still under work so there is a lot of this space left intentionally blank, but all in all it’s shaping up to be a good set that ties the lot together.

Some surprises like the fact that the Portal component would seem to be all about the OracleAS Portal and nothing to do with WebLogic Portal, except WSRP support popping up for the OAS Portal all of a sudden, although I do have to say that configuring the security for the WRSP seems a lot more involved than with WLP. I’m sure that they will ease the process going forward.

Anyway, do go and check out the very interesting Oracle Fusion Middleware overview of the Administrator Guide, definitely worth the read. Also, take a guick glance at the Oracle Fusion Middleware Components list for a good link list to all of the docs (in addition to the list being interesting in and of itself).

Enterprise Architect 7.5

Juha Technical , 0 Comment

Enterprise Architect is the weapon of choice for any major modelling work I need to do (Visio is better for small beer) and it is wonderful to see such an abundant set of features in the new release. I am especially interested in the scripting functionality, as I would like to model with EA but then feed that model into my own template engine for code generation.

Will of course need to look at the MDG stuff, but last time I looked, trying to jump through the hoops to create the templates that I wanted for EA MDG was too much of a hassle. Matching the model with the templates and handling that complexity is enough without the stiffness of MDG.

Also the business rule and process modelling stuff sounds interesting as well as the Strategic Modelling functionality, will need delve deep into those. Here’s the Enterprise Architect link.