Fight­ing with the Ora­cle Direc­to­ry Serv­er 7 (DSEE7) on Solaris 10 update 9

After mov­ing our sec­ondary man­age­ment site (our team is split up into 2 dif­fer­ent loca­tions) to a new build­ing, we decid­ed to clean-up some things. One of those things involves mov­ing the LDAP to a dif­fer­ent machine (more or less a new serv­er for the new site, it is inde­pen­dent regard­ing LDAP/homes/… from the pri­ma­ry site). While I am at it, I take the oppor­tu­ni­ty to move from DSEE5 to DSEE7 (my pre­vi­ous post about the DSEE6 migra­tion was at the pri­ma­ry site). This time I took the pack­age dis­tri­b­u­tion instead of the zip dis­tri­b­u­tion (the main rea­son is that I can get patch-listings with an auto­mat­ic tool, and the sec­ondary man­age­ment site has no disaster-recovery require­ments for the appli­ca­tions… we just will set­up a new sec­ondary site some­where else if necessary).

Here my expe­ri­ences with the instal­la­tion instruc­tions of DSEE7.

  • The install instruc­tions refer to the web inter­face for the DSEE7 man­age­ment, but I have not seen some­thing which tells you first have to set­up an appli­ca­tion serv­er (this was bet­ter in the DSEE6 instructions).
  • When using the Glass­fish appli­ca­tion serv­er which comes with Solaris 10 for the web inter­face, you will get an excep­tion after deploy­ing the dscc7.war, as it is using an out­dat­ed JVM. After some fight­ing and Googling, I found that I have to change the AS_JAVA val­ue in /usr/appserver/config/asenv.conf to a more recent JVM as it is point­ing to the very out­dat­ed j2se 1.4.x. I point­ed it to /usr/java (which is a sym­link to the most recent ver­sion installed as a pack­age). Instead of the orig­i­nal excep­tion I got anoth­er one now (after a redi­rec­tion in the web-browser), some­thing that it can not find the AntMain class (Glass­fish uses ANT from /usr/sfw, this is the one which comes with Solaris 10 update 9). I tried with Java 5 instead of Java 6, but I get the same error. In the net there are some dis­cus­sions about such errors (it is even a FAQ at the ANT site), but this Glassfish/DSEE7 thing is a black box for me, so what am I sup­posed to do here (I do not want to put the sys­tem into an unof­fi­cial state by installing my own ANT for Glassfish/DSEE7)?
    It was not men­tioned in the Appen­dix of the DSEE7 install instruc­tions which explains how to install the .war in Glass­fish that you have to change to a more recent JVM, and I still fight with the AntMain prob­lem (hey Ora­cle, there is room for improve­ment in the prod­uct com­pat­i­bil­i­ty test­ing and doc­u­men­ta­tion ver­i­fi­ca­tion process).

I will update this post­ing when I make some advance­ments. For now I let the web inter­face in the bad state as it is and con­cen­trate on fin­ish­ing the LDAP move to the new sys­tem (installing an DSEE on a back­up sys­tem, con­fig­ur­ing repli­ca­tion, switch­ing the clients to them). The web inter­face is inde­pen­dent enough to han­dle it lat­er (hints wel­come, that is the main pur­pose why I write this pos­ing in the mid­dle of the work).