Firewall dropping Oracle database connections in WebSphere connection pool?

We recently switched one of our client’s WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal based infrastructure to a new physical environment. During our testing we found that we were getting stale connection exceptions in SystemOut.log and in the application logs. On digging a little deeper, our team tracked it down to the fact that the Cisco firewall was dropping our Oracle database connections after they had been inactive for a certain amount of time. When our team discussed the issue with the network team, they were essentially told that all was good with the network infrastructure. The application team tweaked some of the connection pool settings but that only helped alleviate the issue slightly and we started encountering performance issues. Eventually, we figured out a solution that works!

Logging in to a Windows domain for the first time remotely over VPN

Over the weekend, I reinstalled Windows XP on a work laptop as my laptop had finally accumulated enough junk and had slowed down enough to make this time investment worthwhile. I had figured that I would need to go into the office to join the laptop to the office Windows domain. However, I was able to VPN in and join the domain without any issues. The next challenge was to login using my Active Directory domain account remotely (outside my office – from home) when I had never logged in to the domain on this laptop.

Mozy caused my Windows XP laptop to freeze during startup

Hey – no blogging for 5+ months and now 2 entries in a day!! Striking while the iron is hot.

You can never have enough backups – I am certainly a believer in that adage. My laptop backups consist of the following -

• I manually create ghost images of my laptop onto an external USB hard drive once a month – these come in handy if the hard drive crashes or if Windows is corrupted. I keep the external hard drive at home.
• I back up key folders on my laptop onto NAS storage at work using Robocopy – this is incredibly fast to backup large folders that only have small changes. And it is fast enough for large changes as well.
• I back up my Outlook PST files using Retrospect onto NAS storage at work because of open file support.
• I have recently started to back up Outlook PST files and other key folders using Mozy Home – in case you don’t know about Mozy, it is an EMC offering that provides secure, remote, online backups.

While I have never restored from Mozy, I certainly have had ocassion to use my other backups at various times. Mozy seems to be (to be verified) great insurance if things go horribly wrong!

Earlier this week, I suddenly had a problem with my laptop not rebooting cleanly. It sat on the black screen with the Windows logo and the blue progress bar forever. I tried giving it time (almost 20 minutes) but to no avail. I eventually rebooted into safe mode successfully, but even there Windows Explorer was taking a long time to open up. I ran chkdsk -f but that did not help me boot into normal mode.  I gave up pretty damn quickly and ended up just restoring my latest laptop image onto a spare Dell Latitude D830, and using a crossover cable between my two laptops to copy over the files (robocopy to the rescue to quickly sync over files). I was up and running on my spare laptop in ~4 hours.

But the next day, I installed a Windows update and had to reboot and to my dismay, I was stuck yet again on the reboot. After a little bit of digging, I finally tracked it down.

Custom theme HTML corruption in WPE 6.0.1.3+

Yes, I am back from the dead! It has been a long time since I blogged – just been very busy and blogging fell by the wayside. Recently one of the developers on my team ran into an issue with a custom theme when he applied the 6.0.1.5 fixpack on a WebSphere Portal 6.0.x.x server. The theme was exhibiting some very odd behavior – HTML snippets in the output were getting randomly misplaced – i.e. the HTML output was getting garbled with some HTML incorrectly appearing before other HTML, and the theme was having visual issues. And the odd thing was that only one of the custom themes was exhibiting the issue while other themes seemed to work well, making him believe that there was something wrong with the failing theme. He had a PMR open with IBM support for 2+ weeks but that had got him nowhere with getting the issue resolved. So I finally got involved in helping him out 

Finally seem to have resolved my Dell Latitude D830 freeze issue!

Those of you who have been following my Dell Latitude D830 laptop freeze saga, know that I have been struggling for 3+ months with my laptop simply stopping to respond to mouse clicks/keys.  The only way out used to be a hard reset using the power button. In the comments section of my previous post, I had documented all the tweaks that I had tried in hope of resolving the issue, and many people pitched in with their ideas and experience as this is a fairly widespread issue. Well, since my latest changes, I have been freeze free for the last 3+ weeks, and I think I am finally ready to declare victory.