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Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS), Lead - Dale Hubler

Members: Roger B, TED Trainer, Help Desk Representative

March 30, 2006

No effort has been spent on OCS the past 2 weeks other than normal system monitoring. The system is running and stable, although the product has several shortcomings. It is getting light usage from a small set of test users.

Rich is investigating the possibilities of outsourcing the support of OCS, with the servers to be provided by and located at GCC.

March 9, 2006

Little work has been done on OCS this week. The email problem for Mark Edgar and Amber Medrano remains unresolved. Oracle support has failed to solve this in spite of much time spent. This issue is now 1 month old. A different userid was created for both users. This demonstrates quite well the flaws in the current support path we have for OCS. If this is to be production a better support contract must exist as I doubt users would wait a month for a simple account issue to be resolved. Oracle has (mistakenly) noted this issue as awaiting customer input and is now ignoring it.

Ian Sparkes is working on a proposal to create a new OCS install that would hopefully work better and be suitable for production.

March 2, 2006

There has been little progress this past week. We continue to try to solve the email problems being experienced by Mark Edgar and Amber Medrano. We are unable to create their userid to have email capability. We'd thought this was solved for Mark but were wrong. While we succesfully added his account, he was unable to use the email feature still. We cannot even add Amber's account. Multiple web conferences have been held with oracle but we do not have any solution to this yet.

Any other time spent on this was primarily day-to-day monitoring and administration of the servers it is running on.

February 23, 2006

(a little) Progress first

Mark Edgar finally has an account complete with email. It took oracle support 2 weeks to solve this. The solution involved logging into the database using a mail userid and deleting some entries. Following this the account was recreated via the web pages and is now working. Amber Medrano's account must be similarly fixed yet.

The servers were rebooted and a resulting database error prevented the infrastructure server from starting properly. Once it was determined the database required recovery by our consultant that was fixed and the server restarted. The application server started without problems. The system was down for 4 hours total.

The voice (CT) server was shutdown and a ghost backup of the drive was created. The server required a couple of reboots to start again, as there is a known issue with OCS and Netmerge contending. The server must be allowed to settle down for 20 minutes before one can login, shutdown oracle (allowing netmerge to start), and then startup oracle. A voice message was sent to test it, and it is working again.

We are beginning to look for higher level hardware to run this system on. We are also looking into what oracle support options will work better to solve issues and avoid 2 week turnaround times for problem resolution.

Obstacles to this project include the low-end support we have with oracle that results in 2 week long solutions requiring hours of administrator time to resolve simple issues such as getting a new user email access, and also a stream on incessant, protracted email discussions. This week has also given us multiple surveys to complete, although some questions seem to show a decisive lack of understanding of technology. The OCS software itself is quirky. Since it is a combination of many separate product's configuration files and logs are not logically consolidated, problems are difficult to solve. The Vmware server is bogged down running all these hosts and has performance problems.

As fas as what remains to be done, it seems we must make every feature of this software work. Current problems are system email from application server cannot be sent out - no solution from oracle, unison database backups of calendar must be developed, apparently userid creation from ldif files is problematic and will require manual SQL interaction with the infrastructure database to repair, oracle's ldap server will not be subservient to any other ldap server (requiring us to load accounts via and ldif file), no firewalling instructions other than a large list of ports various services might use - coupled with oracle's admonition that this product should be firewalled, no EMG agent working on the application server, software contention bugs causing improper startup of the voice server, and no automated startup scripts provided by oracle - coupled with the need to enter passwords upon reboots - preventing automatic starts upon reboots.

February 16, 2006

The problem with Mark Edgar's email provisioning remains open with oracle. Several attempts at solving this have failed, oracle is still trying to solve this. Amber's email is similarly broken. Amber has a working login, Mark doesn't (since we are using his account to solve the error).

Ian Sparkes worked with Rich Lang to verify the Mac platform could access the content services. They were able to mount directly into a user's file share.

The servers are working a bit oddly since they were rebooted last week. A subsequent reboot is planned for some morning.

The portal development feature is being reviewed.

February 16, 2006

Current week planning: For next week: Testing feedback fed back into planning process

Planning process outline:

Develop customer requirements

Develop production hardware/software strategies based on customer reqs Develop production implementation strategy Procure production hardware

Develop training strategy/plan

Implementation Phase Wrap up work

February 9, 2006

Several accounts were added to OCS via an LDIF file but not all worked right. One of the defective (no email) accounts was used for testing and deleted. Now it cannot be added again. An SR was opened with oracle and they have provided a few ways to remove the account, none of which have worked so far.

The CT was backed via MS backup. A ghost image of the drive will be made next week.

The text to voice service requires a separate MS XMLVoice Gateway server to be obtained, installed, and configured.

The servers were rebooted while attempting to enable content services. The content services did not start due to some locked database account. The servers seem a bit quirky after the reboot, although no apparent cause is recognized at this time.

February 2, 2006

The OCS software's voice feature was worked on for the month of Jan. The vendor was unable to make this feature work well, in spite of much time spent by the staff and also our consultant. (oracle staff, Ian Sparkes from Cronus, Lamont Opp, Rich Lang, Dale, others) At this time Rich Lang may actually have gotten this to work. The system still needs a reboot to verify any working config is persistent afterwards.

Otherwise most other time has been spent on backups and it seems the backups themselves are working reliably. The backups were designed by our consultant and recovery procedures are not well understood. The backups are stored on another server and consume roughly 75GB of space. These are excluded from arcserve as they represent off-host backups of backups.

Otherwise the software has been stable and provided reliable email service and presumably calendar & file service too. The web conferencing software has been used extensively in debugging the various problems. A userid was created for Roger Bontrager, others who expressed a curiosity were provided one of the test accounts to look about. There are many outstanding issues yet to be resolved. Near term we hope to complete the voice setup and find a way to load userids from an LDAP server or LDIF dump.

GCC:
Our Experience. Your Success.