Unable to login to BPEL or ESB Console after unsuccessful login

After providing invalid credentials at BPEL Console, BPEL Admin Console, or ESB Control, if valid credentials are entered, then every attempt to log in will result in the "Authentication Failed" error message.

Reason is that the OC4J instance uses the parameter  ‘-Doc4j.formauth.redirect=true’, and OC4J does not redirect correctly.  This invalid redirection prevents BPEL and ESB from being redirected to the correct page after a successful login attempt if there was a failed login attempt.

Workaround is you take login_error.jsp off from URL http://<host>:<port>/BPELConsole/login_error.jsp, So your URL would look like http://<host>:<port>/BPELConsole/. This will automatically log you in. Since the problem was with redirection and not with your credentials

Fix is to apply patch 7202167 from metalink. 

Book Review: Processing XML documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g

Recently I have been approached by Packt Publishing to review their recently released book “Processing XML documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g” by Deepak Vohra. They were kind enough to send me an e-book, which suits more to a person like me who lives out of suitcase.

Coming back to the point, as the book rightly mentioned, its objective is “to discuss XML development in Oracle JDeveloper” especially around JDeveloper 11g. JDeveloper has matured into a very robust IDE especially in J2EE and SOA arena. It’s XML handling capabilities are worthy enough to be mentioned separately. In a way Gaurav did a very smart job of focusing on one topic rather than try to cover wider topics in shallow waters.

First six chapters covers the basic of XML document, DOM, SAX, XSD, XSLT, XPath, JSTL XML taglibs. It was little bit an over-stretch for me, but I wouldn’t discount it completely as it can be really helpful for somebody who is really starting from scratch (truly no exemption). Most of the examples covered in these chapters can be easily mapped to other parsers without much difficulties. Chapter seven, eight and nine are amongst the ones which interested me most. I like theory portion of DOM 3.0 LS.

Chapter 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 covers interesting and useful applied XML technologies like XMLDiff, XML2PDF, XML2XLS, Berkeley and XML Publisher. Chapters cover enough to give you a start but to deal with real life scenarios you might have to dig deeper. All in all these chapters might excite those who really like to try something new and different.

Overall it’s an easy read book which explains XML fundamentals in easy to understand language. I would definitely like this book as a beginner but it doesn’t have a lot to offer at intermediate level. I would have like to see some literature around SDOM, AJAX, StAX. All in all this is a good beginners book covering XML and related technologies.

oc4jadmin password change in SOA Suite

The administrator password for each OC4J instance in the Cluster must be the same as the administrator password for the OC4J instance on which Application Server Control is running. So if you have something like home which is your admin instance and than you  have oc4j_soa, oc4j_wsm, oc4j_gtwy and you have to change password of oc4jadmin then you have to perform following steps.

1. Change oc4jadmin password for admin oc4j in cluster. 
   • Simply log in using the oc4jadmin user name and password, and then click Setup.
2. On each node and oc4j edit ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/oc4j_instance_name/config/system-jazn-data.xml to update oc4jadmin password

<user>
     <name>oc4jadmin</name>
     <display-name>OC4J Administrator</display-name>
     <guid>41A2E560C96711DABFD08D3BF8B780C4</guid>
     <description>OC4J Administrator</description>
     <credentials>{903}4nlfYYDwaqMJipVbGXuS2ce8egfwBPqp</credentials>
</user>

Modify credentials to say password123. Please remember to put ! as the exclamation point (!) ensures that the password will be encrypted in the configuration file.

<credentials>!password123</credentials>

Node:There is another approach of modifying with EM console where you go to Cluster Topology > <remote_oc4j> > Administration > Security Providers > Instance Level Security > Realms > click the number in the Users column. Click oc4jadmin and modify password. Return to the Cluster Topology page and restart the remote OC4J instance.

SOA Suite Log File Rotation

In <ORACLE_HOME>/opmn/conf/opmn.xml, apply the following changes for each OC4J you want to modify log file settings

• Add -Dstdstream.filesize=FILE_SIZE_IN_MB -Dstdstream.filenumber=TOTAL_NO_OF_FILES parameters in the <java-options>. For example, if you want to limit log file size to 10MB and total number of files to be created to 10 than add

-Dstdstream.filesize=10 -Dstdstream.filenumber=10

• Add -out and -err parameters to the <oc4j-options> to specify standard output and standard error log files.

-out $ORACLE_HOME/opmn/logs/soa_log.out -err $ORACLE_HOME/opmn/logs/soa_log.err

Apply the changes and restart OC4J. If you are just restarting OC4J make sure to reload opmn before restarting.

After restart you should be able to see log files soa_log_YYYY_MM_DD_HH_MI_SS.out and  soa_log_YYYY_MM_DD_HH_MI_SS.err created under $ORACLE_HOME/opmn/logs/<oc4j_name>_<group_name>_<jvm_id> folder.

How To Control The Size Of The BPEL domain.log File

1.  Logon to your server and navigate to directory BPEL_HOME/domains/<domain name>/config.

2.  Make a backup copy of the log4j-config.xml file.

3.  Open the log4j-config.xml file for edit.

4.  Change the appender class from com.collaxa.cube.util.CXRollingFileAppender to org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender.

5.  Add the property MaxFileSize:

<param value="10MB" name="MaxFileSize" />

Here, a maximum file size of 10MB is specified, but you can make it whatever value suits your environment.  The top of the log4j-config.xml file now looks like:

<log4j:configuration xmlns:log4j="http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j/">
<appender class="com.collaxa.cube.util.CXRollingFileAppender" name="A1">
<param value="true" name="ImmediateFlush" />
<param value="false" name="Append" />
<param value="C:/oracle/ora10g/soasuite/bpel/domains/default/logs/domain.log" name="File" />
<param value="10" name="MaxBackupIndex" />
<param value="10MB" name="MaxFileSize"/>
<layout class="org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout">

6.  Save the file, and restart the BPEL container.

Please note that these changes will be carried forward to any new domain that you create.  If you have already created domains in addition to default, you will need to change the log4j-config.xml file for each of these domains to limit the size of those log files.