Details: 03 November 2021

At home I have a pretty difficult networking situation. In the evenings especially if a lot of people around are at home the WLAN is not working at all, over the day I have full speed (using AI-Mesh) but in the evening it tends to be horrible slow.
So I looked for a power-line network to get at least a good connection to the most important points. So the use-case is simple I have to bridge two points. After I know that the speed depends on the power-line I was calculating to get about 50% of my 300/50Mbit line speed. Here are the notes which I took after struggling and testing different producer. The Upload/Download tests were all done with speedtest.net.

Devolo

devolo Magic 1 LAN Starter Kit, LAN Powerline Adapter -bis zu 1.200 Mbit/s, ideal für Home Office und Gaming, 1x Gigabit LAN Anschluss, dLAN 2.0, weiß

My first PowerLAN adapter were from devolo and I was pretty happy with them so these were my first choice. The administration console is fine, the configuration with the "power save mode" is tricky. I have on the other side a router connected and even if the adapter should not (because the router is always online), the adapters go to sleep, so I needed to turn the power save mode off. The tests were ok but the download rate was with 86,5 disappointing the upload with 48 was at max. I paid 76€ for them.

AVMFritz

AVM FRITZ!Powerline 510E Set (500 Mbit/s, Fast-Ethernet-LAN) deutschsprachige Version

After I was disappointed from the Devolo I ordered two other systems.

The AVMFritz are pretty small and cheap, they don't have a socket built, so you will loose a socket in your home but they are pretty cheap with 42€. With a download of 79,7MBit they are about the same as the Devolo stuff, an upload of 30,7 is pretty low.

D-Link

D-Link DHP-P601AV PowerLine Gigabit Passthrough Kit (AV2, enthält zwei Adapter, Datenübertragunsraten von bis zu 1000 Mbit/s)

With 52€ they the price is ok. There is a power save mode which you can't turn off as it seems, but until now I never had the "devolo looses suddenly connection" problem, probably the implementation is better. The Download with 130MBit and Upload of 50Mbit is much higher as the ones from Devolo. After they are also about 25 bucks cheaper I will give them a try. In case they turn up to have any flaws I will post an update.

Details: 20 October 2021

I need to get MapViewer going to validate my own data imports. I began the installation on a new weblogic and everything worked fine.

One thing what was pretty stupid was that I tried to get to the admin server console by using http://localhost:7001/, but of course the console is an app and therefore needs to be called via http://localhost:7001/console.

The really annoying part was that I needed to create a datasource and this did not work with a pluggable database (I just have a multitenant installation).

  <map_data_source name="test"
                   jdbc_host="myhost"
                   jdbc_sid="mysid"
                   jdbc_port="1521"
                   jdbc_user="test"
                   jdbc_password="!test" 
                   jdbc_mode="thin"
                   number_of_mappers="3"
                   allow_jdbc_theme_based_foi="false"
                   editable="false"
   />

The documented part is the exclamation mark in front of the password, which autoencrypts the password with the next restart.

But it was not possible to get a connection to the database, I always got

ORA-12505, TNS:listener does not currently know of SID given in connect descriptor

I could not get it going for almost a full day. I found an old installation instruction and the solution is to prefix the SID with double slash.

  <map_data_source name="test"
                   jdbc_host="myhost"
                   jdbc_sid="//mysid"
                   jdbc_port="1521"
                   jdbc_user="test"
                   jdbc_password="test" 
                   jdbc_mode="thin"
                   number_of_mappers="3"
                   allow_jdbc_theme_based_foi="false"
                   editable="false"
   />

I could not find any documentation about that, therefore my note here.

Details: 24 February 2021

It seems there was a security feature builtin to the Chrome/Edge which prevents local links (file:///c:/test.xls) to open.

This seems to be pretty awful for Intranet sites where this was used for ages, so you end up with an endless amount of local links around.

I really also don't understand why you can't define an exception for e.g. local files/Intranet. But however there are some solutions/workarounds I found.

Use Firefox

To be honest, even if the new Edge is a very cool browser, they did a lot with Firefox and I think this is a also a decent choice you should consider even for a company.

Change the Group Policy to handle a list of exceptions as "Internet Explorer"

This applies to Edge and reading through the articles this means a lot of configuration and fiddling with Group Policys.

Rewrite the links and use Office URI schemes

This is the solution I went for, of course you need to be able to change the links (which is possible at my side), and it is all about office documents here, so this fits my needs.

So the links changed from:

<a href="/ file:///x:/localintranetfiles/mytest.csv ">Download</a>

to:

<a href="/ file:///x:/localintranetfiles/mytest.csv ">Download</a>

<a href="ms-excel:ofv|u|file:///x:/localintranetfiles/mytest.csv">Download</a>

I hope this helps to find a proper solution for you!

Details: 07 January 2020

After a upgrade to buster I was not able to get the bridge interface online, I created a public bridge as described here 5 years ago and never touched it again.

After completely reinstalling the system (after that was my intention for some time for other reasons), I had the same issue.

I could solve the issue by simply installing the package bridge-utils. I have no idea why this dependency is missing, probably just a bug.

apt install bridge-utils

Details: 07 January 2020

I did a fresh installation of one of my server, including upgrade of all disks.

When rebooting in a fresh Debian installation I got stuck with the message "Scanning for devices. Please wait, this may take several minutes".

After 5 hours of trial and error, reading manuals and posts I found the solution.

In the PERC Raid Controller I had to create two new virtual disks and the boot order of the virtual disks which you can assign in the RAID Controller configuration was set to the wrong virtual disk...

Details: 08 August 2019

When starting the glassfish server via IntelliJ I always got a Null-Pointer exception with JDK 8 (it was for sure not 9).

I had to set the environment variable AS_JAVA in <<glassfish_home>>\glassfish\config\asenv.bat to the full path of my JDK in order to get rid of it.

set AS_JAVA=C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.8.0_144

I can just guess, that this is probably a problem when starting IntelliJ 64bit and glassfish? is probably 32bit?

Details: 05 April 2019

When registering an XSD to oracle with dbms_xmlschema.registerSchema I got the strange error

LPX-00209: PI names starting with XML are reserved

This error occured because I had a leading CR in front (from copy/paste importing). Just removed it and everything was fine.

Details: 02 April 2019

Easier than I thought. After fiddling with command line I found out that you can simple use CTRL+ALT+END.

!!END!! not DELETE!!!

Details: 01 November 2018

Troubles with Oracle Report fonts

A while ago I was noticing strange symbol characters in Oracle Reports PDF output after a major version upgrade of the Middleware. They looked kind of greek and I could not find a solution. Turned out you should really search for "Greek" characters Oracle Reports, which brings you to the Oracle Bug 2906401 - FONT ALIASING NOT WORKING FOR ALL FIELDS WITH WE8ISO8859P15 CHARACTERSET.
Don't be confused, that is also a problem with any other character set. If you go to the solution you have a lot of different ways to bypass that. Below you find the way it worked on our system. The solution with creating backup directories and script was too complicated for me, so there is a one-liner which is doing the same.

sed -i 's/EncodingScheme AdobeStandardEncoding/EncodingScheme FontSpecific/' $ORACLE_HOME/guicommon/tk/admin/AFM/*

To make it short there are AFM files (Adobe Font Metrics) which Oracle Reports is using to generate the PDF files. These need to be changed in order to generate correct PDF output.

Details: 29 September 2018

Recently I needed a good PLSQL tool also on Linux, after the whole Oracle stuff has massive flaws I decided to use the best tool on the market (PL/SQL Developer from Allround Automations) with Wine.
After I really like how Codeweavers are supporting the open source project wine, I decided to purchase the commercial version Crossover (very close to wine).
I tried a bit around and what I found out is that on my Linux system (Debian Stretch with Gnome, 3 sreens) PL/SQL Developer 12 ist not working (windows flipping endless).
I decided to go to version 11, and also take the 32bit version (had a headache with 64 bit version on wine), I also took Windows 7 (why not its stable...) and the R11 instant client (because I know this version is working).

The results are fantastic, until now I could not find any bugs, all looks good, below you find the steps it took me.

Download
PL/SQL Developer 11 32bit (PL/SQL Developer downloads)
Oracle Instant Client 11.2 32bit (instantclient-basic-win32-11.1.0.7.0.zip) (Instant Client Download)

Create Bottle
Create a new Windows 7 32bit bottle (I did it via the cxsetup GUI, but of course you can also do it by script)

Open the c: drive of your bottle (wherever it is located on your system) and install the instant client

cd ~/.cxoffice/PLSQLDEV/dosdevices/c:/
mkdir -p oracle/network/admin
unzip ~/Downloads/instantclient-basic-win32-11.1.0.7.0
mv instantclient_11_1 oracle/bin

Set some environment variables
Run regedit in the bottle (I did it via the bottle manager).

Create a Key Oracle in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software.
Add String NLS_LANG HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Oracle with value AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8.

Add bin directory to path and set TNS_ADMIN (so the client finds our tnsnames.ora files for sure).
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment
Edit PATH and add c:\oracle;c:\oracle\bin;

Add String TNS_ADMIN and set it to c:\oracle (yes I place my tnsnames file always in c:\oracle because I usually have multiple installations and want to just maintain one file).
Close regedit.

Create tnsnames.ora file.

cat > ~/.cxoffice/PLSQLDEV/dosdevices/c:/oracle/tnsnames.ora <<- EOF
MYDB =
(DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = localhost)(PORT = 1521))
    (CONNECT_DATA =
      (SERVER = DEDICATED)
      (SERVICE_NAME = XE)
    )
)
EOF

Install PL/SQL Developer 11
After everything is prepared just install the software into the bottle (did it again via GUI).

Details: 26 August 2018

I just wanted to copy some stuff from a PDF which did not work because of some strange formatting, so I gave it a try with a PDF editor. Surprisingly everything is contained in LibreOffice.

On my Debian system I just had to install the pdfimporter (not installed by default).

apt install libreoffice-pdfimport

Then just open the file withing Draw, that's it.

Details: 22 August 2018

I had lately the problem that my crossover (wine) bottle did not have any audio driver.

/opt/cxoffice/bin/cxdiag

revealed that a audio driver was missing.

apt install libpulse0:i386

solved the problem.

Page 1 of 11

Troubles with powerLAN network

Devolo

AVMFritz

D-Link

mapviewer with a pluggable database

Open local files in Edge/Chrome/Chromium does not work

Use Firefox

Change the Group Policy to handle a list of exceptions as "Internet Explorer"

Rewrite the links and use Office URI schemes

KVM Networking - buster upgrade

Scanning for devices. Please wait, this may take several minutes

Null Pointer when starting glassfish via IntelliJ 8

LPX-00209: PI names starting with XML are reserved

Change password over Remote Desktop (RDP)

Strange "Greek" symbol characters in Oracle Reports PDF output

Troubles with Oracle Report fonts

Run PL/SQL Developer in crossover/wine

How to edit PDF in Linux

No audio device in wine (crossover)