Easy, just run:

net statistics server

Or, you could check the Event Log. Windows Server 2003 machines record their up-time every day at noon in the System Event Log:

But, if you don’t have or need anything fancy (or even if you do for that matter), one of the most common tweaks I recommend to customers prior to a Health Check is to turn on Response Time monitoring. By default, application servers like IIS or WebLogic don’t track how long they take to serve up a page, but it’s easy to turn that on for later analysis.

In IIS, you just turn on the “time-taken” header in the logs:

In Apache or other Java App Servers, use a line line this:

LogFormat "%{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t %p \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" \"%{Cookie}i\" %h %I %O %D" combined-withcookie

It’s the %D that logs the time taken in milliseconds – see the Apache Log documentation for details.

Either way, you should get a log line that looks like this:

- - - [14/Feb/2012:01:11:51 -0400] 80 "GET /portal/server.pt HTTP/1.1" 200 843 "http://portal/server.pt?space=Login" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.1)" "" 10.10.12.26 710 1133 17099

… where one of the items is milliseconds (or, in Apache’s case, microseconds) that were taken to process and serve the request. This is hugely valuable information for identifying which pages, communities, or content types are slowing you down.

At first, I thought this was the same one I wrote about in February of last year – the IE8 Critical Fix. But, it turns out that this patch was released in May in 2011.

From the release notes in the patch called “Patch 12423316: WLS1034: UNDER JROCKIT, COLLABORATION PROJECT ACCESS FAILS WITH TREEUNMARSHALL“, these are the issues resolved. With the exception of the first one, everything else is the same as the February patch:

• Using JRockit with Weblogic Server 10.3.4 collaboration project access throws a TreeUnmrashall exception (12423316).
• WebEdit does not work on IE8. (9723488)
• Error in task submenu in IE8 (9712774)
• Cannot upload multiple files in Collab (9274372)
• Bulk upload JRE updated to 1.6 in order to support IE8 (8760280)
• Notifications should be sent from a fixed address for creation and deletion (9647426) This fix involves updates to both collab and notification components.
• Subscription to project overview causes conflicts with Immedate Subscriptions (8759642)
• Non gatewayed webedit does not work (9434805)
• File leak in Search Service during search index rebuild (11726008)
• Webcenter Collaboration notifications to large numbers of recipients fail (9484113)

So, sure, this patch from May of last year supersedes that one from February. What’s strange, though, is that the link I provided in the post last year no longer works. Shouldn’t it have a message that says “this is no longer the latest patch version”, or “click here to see a list of all critical fixes released for this product”? In fact, where IS the definitely list of all of Oracle’s critical fixes? Seriously, does ANYONE know?

Don’t get me started on Oracle’s BS monthly email about all their “critical patches”. In fact, maybe you should, ’cause I’m this close to writing a Wall of Shame Rant about that ridiculousness. I mean, really, WHO is possibly helped by this?

Either way, stay tuned here for some reviews of the new Collab 10gR4 version, which presumably contains these patches (although, not totally guaranteed given the strange release history).

To send CTRL-ALT-DEL to a remote desktop via RDP (Windows Remote Desktop), use CTRL-ALT-END in a Remote Desktop session to get the familiar password change dialog:

Fun fact: CTRL-ALT-DELETE is a Secure Attention Key, which basically means that unlike any other keystroke combination you can do (which applications, and therefore other malware, can intercept), it’s a special combination that only the OS is allowed to interact with.

Or, more to the point, occasionally the Analytics Collector service keeps running (so many of your existing monitors don’t see it as “down”), but it stops recording data for one reason or another.

The trick is to create a monitor that basically says “let me know if no user logins have occurred in the past day”, because if nothing has been recorded, either the site you’re tracking sucks or the Analytics Collector is sucking. Using whatever tool you’d like (HP’s SiteScope is a popular one, and we use Function1′s Watcher on some sites), just create a monitor that runs the below query once per day, and notifies you if ZERO results are returned, which would indicate a problem with the collector:

select count(1)
from asfact_logins
where occurred > (getdate() - 1)

That way, you won’t have to explain to the boss why your Analytics report looks like this:

Well, it’s time for a refresh on the .NET decompiler landscape – a new (to me at least) tool that I’ve used to successfully decompile and resolve issues with the Plumtree portal is Telerik’s JustDecompile. It’s as simple to use as the other tools we’ve featured and it’s free!

Hat tip to Andrew Foster for this one – it seems that some of the pre-6.5 Publisher settings still work in Publisher 6.5. Specifically, if you’re having problems getting Publisher to load your custom styles from community-themes.txt when you create a new header portlet, or you see an error like the one below in Publisher Diagnostics, then you can use the old setting CommunityStyleSheetListURL to get Publisher to properly load it.

In other words, if you’re getting this:

… then you should create a line in content.properties to fix that error:

CommunityStyleSheetListURL= http://machine_name /imageserver/plumtree/common/public/css/community-themes.txt

… and your custom styles will then be available when creating Header portlets in WCI:

With Neo, that all changes. The new Knowledge Directory portlet – part of the new Neo Portlet bundle – is a decent portlet that provides most of the expected functionality:

It even has a pretty solid configuration screen (for both admin and personal settings) to choose a base folder, properties that you’d like to have presented, and some formatting options:

You’ll find a special offer after the break if you’re so inclined…

On the other hand, it doesn’t allow for inline editing of metadata, folder deletion, card creation, or advanced search options. But I know one product that does (hint: it’s on this site!):

We’re planning on open-sourcing all of Integryst’s current products at some point, but if you’d like a FREE copy of Integryst’s awesome KD Browser TODAY ONLY*, drop us a line and we’ll hook you up!

* “Today Only” means today. As in, the day that you read this, or the day that you ask for a free copy. Or, you know, pretty much any day. Just trying to add a little melodrama to these posts – with WCI it’s not all that easy…

I wish I could tell you in the four intervening months that I’ve seen such a document, but sadly, I still haven’t. It does seem, though, that since then, some updates were made to Oracle’s What’s New section of the release notes, so, you know, there’s that.

Officially, as of this writing here are the latest updates:

• Support for .NET 3.5 and Java 1.6
• Support for Intel 64-bit on Windows and Linux
• New adaptive tags supporting multi-level menus and trees, adaptive tag caching, higher level logic tags, and adaptive tag sample portlet
• Advanced search adaptive layout page
• Support for displaying Pagelet Producer pagelets in Oracle WebCenter Interaction
• New KD portlet
• Tagging Engine
• Native RSS integration
• New password management features

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be diving into some of these features, as well as Collaboration Server and any other new stuff we can find. Stay tuned!

The installation process for the portal will be pretty familiar to those of you who’ve done any before, although there are a LOT of new options, as Oracle has chosen to bundle together most of the new stuff into three uber-installers (Portal, Collab, Analytics).

The portal installer in particular really throws in everything and the kitchen sink – even things like the IDK and Documentum Crawlers are all bundled in there:

Details after the break.

For reference, the installer options are:

• Portal Services and Components
• Administrative Portal
• Automation Service
• Portal
• API Service
• Image Service
• Search
• Document Repository Service
• Content Upload Service
• Directory Service
• Remote Portlet Service
• Notification Service
• Tagging Engine Service
• Search Service
• Crawler Services
• Documentum Content Service
• UCM Content Service
• Lotus Notes Content Service
• Windows File Content Service
• Exchange Content Service
• Identity Services
• LDAP Identity Service
• Active Directory Identity Service
• Development Tools
• Interaction Development Kit (IDK)
• JSR 168 Container
• .NET Integration Services
• Console for Sharepoint

I ran through the installer on Windows Server 2003 using SQL Server 2005, and the experience was pretty much the same as it has been for years. I got some unexpected/unspecific errors, but it turns out that they were related to me trying to install components (like the Documentum Crawler) without the appropriate prerequisites (DFC Runtime).

What really has me interested here is that Oracle really has thrown in the “Kitchen Sink” – including a bunch of very old apps that have floated around but never really got Oracle support, including:

• Pathways
• Enterprise Poke
• KD Browser
• my picture profile
• posted links
• profile portlet

Fun times importing all those PTEs!

Stay tuned, as we’ll be taking a look at most of those pieces of “new” functionality soon!