Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Strange Installation Anomaly

I was installing 11.1.1.2 on one of my employees laptops last week and saw this really strange thing. I thought I would write about it as it may save someone time if they see this strange behavior.

First off, let me say that the bulk of the time I spent on the installation was:
  • Uninstalling System 9.3.0
  • Copying 11.1.1.2 installation files to the machine (almost 2 hrs!)
  • Upgrading SQL Server 2005 to Service Pack 3 (required for XML/A from Reporting Services to work properly)

I finally started the actual 11.1.1.2 installation at about 6 pm. My employee took off to run some errands and said if I needed to reboot, just login using the laptops admin/password. I did the complete installation process under her login and everything was smooth. I started the configuration process and was able to connect to my relational datastore (SQL Server) but was unable to proceed with EAS on port 10080. I instantly remembered this was due to the port issue with AVG antivirus; I blogged on that issue a while back.

I disabled the AVG Web Shield and still, no luck with port 10080. I could have easily continued with another port but, for simplicity, I like to use the default ports. I thought to myself that perhaps a reboot was needed. I rebooted, logged in with our admin username and proceeded to the Configuration Utility. This time, though, was less successful.

After the reboot, I could not, for the life of me, get the Configuration Utility to connect to SQL Server. I did everything including dropping/recreating the SQL Server database. After several tries, I was pretty frustrated. That is when I noticed the command window that launched the Configuration Utility had a stack trace in it. The stack trace showed a Java NullPointerException was being thrown in, get this, the validate() method. Some validation routine that is!

As it was getting to be late, about 8 pm, I decided to call my employee and try just one more time using the employees username/password. It worked! It appears that the Oracle Installer or the Configuration Utility may put some files into the users home directory (or users temp directories) and cannot proceed without those files. Very strange.

Note: In a followup to my AVG post, I also discovered you must disable both the Web Shield and LinkScanner components to free up port 10080.

2 comments:

Dave H. said...

Interesting that you upgraded SQL Server 2005 to SP3... Admittedly it is odd that as of 11.1.1.2.0 Oracle-Hyperion hasn't caught-up, but the Install Start Here Guide would imply that only SQL 2000 SP3a or SQL 2005 SP1 are supported platforms of SQL Server (and no support for SQL 2008 at all).

Similarly, Windows Server 2003 SP1 R2 is supported, but not SP2 and Windows XP is only at SP2 (yet all editions except Home series of Vista are supported, and we all know how Fortune 500 is jumping to upgrade to Vista)...

At least we are now finally supported on Internet Explorer 7.0.x and Firefox 2.0.x (nearly three months after IE 8 was released; and, Firefox 3 nearly a year after it was released)...

Tim Tow said...

Upgrading to SQL Server SP3 isn't an issue for us as we are a development shop. If we were running in production, I would stick exactly with the Oracle recommended versions.

As far as the browsers go.. Our first product, ActiveOLAP for Essbase, worked in a browser and we found having the browser a pain... Our Dodeca product doesn't use the browser except for deployment; we control everything regarding the display and the web services talking to the databases and it makes it a more functional, and more dependable, product.

Tim