What a difference makes the wording of a sentence

17 Jun What a difference makes the wording of a sentence

Hi all, for the last couple of years I have been running a quite successful, or at least to my standards 🙂 , Oracle Blog in Spanish, but over these years I have seen that, even though I have a good niche, I want to broaden the people who I can reach, so starting today will try to post both in an English and Spanish language, so I hope you come and enjoy the ride, or at least get a few good tips from time to time.

I want to start by sharing what happened over the weekend, to setup what exactly happened , I had a small release with a client which handles Peoplesoft as this will become important later on in the story.

For this release we had created a GOLD ORACLE_HOME which contained the needed patches for the release and we had cloned it over and over through the development and staging environment without any issues for the people tools application, of course I created a document on the step by step we had to do in order to make this small release succesful and so in case I wasn’t here , anybody could take over and follow through the same procedure we had been doing to get to production.

This client is using a 64 bit Oracle version for its RDBMS, but the peopletools version it is in, has the necessity to have a soft link to a 32 bit version of the library libclntsh.so.9.0 in place, or else the people tools application won’t come up and fail with the below error

dlopen in libpscompat failed for 'libpsora.so': ld.so.1: PSDSTSRV: fatal: libclntsh.so.9.0: open failed: No such file or directory

So what I had to do is create the soft link in the $ORACE_HOME/lib to point the library libclntsh.so.11.1 to the library libclntsh.so.9.0, not much of a deal, correct?

oracle@servidor1.oracleenespanol.blogspot.com [TESTDB] /mount/oracle/product/11.2.0.2/lib
oracle $ cd $ORACLE_HOME/lib

oracle@servidor1.oracleenespanol.blogspot.com [TESTDB] /mount/oracle/product/11.2.0.2/lib
oracle $ ln -s $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libclntsh.so.11.1 libclntsh.so.9.0

But as I said in the title the wording of a document makes the difference, in the document I had the following sentence: “Verify the libclntsh.so.9.0 softlink exists, if it does not create it“

And here is where the trouble came, because the softlink was created before I took a tar of the GOLD ORACLE_HOME, so the softlink existed and I didn’t make an effort to verify the correct location of the soft link, and what caused the error wasnt that it existed in the tar, it was actually that the ORACLE_HOME location for the production environment changed from development/staging environment, that is why that wording went undetected until we got to production :S

So the link in production was pointing to a non existing location, for us to fix this problem was really easy, the only thing I had to do was delete the softlink and recreate it

oracle@servidor1.oracleenespanol.blogspot.com [TESTDB] /mount/oracle/product/11.2.0.2/lib
oracle $ rm libclntsh.so.9.0

oracle@servidor1.oracleenespanol.blogspot.com [TESTDB] /mount/oracle/product/11.2.0.2/lib
oracle $ cd $ORACLE_HOME/lib

oracle@servidor1.oracleenespanol.blogspot.com [TESTDB] /mount/oracle/product/11.2.0.2/lib
oracle $ ln -s $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libclntsh.so.11.1 ./libclntsh.so.9.0

So next time I will try to be more careful with how I write a document and test this document through the environments, will cause me less of a headache in the future

P.S.- This is how it should have been stated :” “Recreate the softlink libclntsh.so.9.0, even if it exists, delete the link and recreate it from the new cloned ORACLE_HOME“