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January 19, 2006
Terrible Tuesday
You know, the bookstore's MBS application does give us grief on occasion, but usually it's pretty stable. Tuesday was the exception that proves the rule.
First, a call from Kristi - The registers are beeping and going off line. No customers can be served. Man, again??!! Pulling up MRTG showed a huge spike in traffic across the switch. This has been a recurring problem, with NO ryme or reason to it. What could be hitting the switch so hard at 8:00? On a hunch I asked Kristi to go downstairs and see if anyone was in the computer lab. Hello, Rick! He was dutifully ghosting half the lab. Well, what do you know, ghosting the lab causes the bookstore registers to totally quit working.
Second thing.
Another call from Kristi?? Now what? Nobody can buy books off our web site. Why not? Oh, no current "term". Well, digging through the admin pages, I see there's a Winter 06 term that doesn't end until Feb 2nd. That's OK. BUT, there's a second entry point, on a totally different page - limiting the time when books can be bought and it's set to Jan. 13, 2006. Switch to Jan. 31, 2006, and voila! All the students who still need to buy textbooks for this term on the web can do so.
Third, and while all of the above was happening, an http default thread was observed to be using about 50% of the server's CPU cycles. Ending the thread merely moved it to another one. Stopping and re-starting the http server did nothing. A call to MBS internet support revealed that this problem had been encountered one other time. Four hours later I was convinced that there was no MBS solution available, however it did seem that placing a packet policy in place would probably be propitious. An email for help to Troy and Travis with the offending IP was the cure. Thanks, guys!
NOT a quiet day at the bookstore!
Posted by rossm at 2:28 PM | Comments (0)
WILB Migration - The End Is In Sight!
Dale and I spent a couple more hours working on migrating the last of the apps on Wilb over to Aero. We are placing a call to the wou_util.web.redirect procedure in all Wilb procedures which show access. The schemas we worked on today were pchp, comments (won't be migrated), and publicbp (Federal work study).
Today we also wrote a small procedure that does not redirect users to the new page, it simply gives them the URL, but they must take some action to get the app. This is a kind of "half-way" step, so that users are encouraged to get the Aero URL in place. Hopefully, this will reduce the number of users who will hit the Wilb apps, who knows.
We also decided to speak with Joan G. and Ron S. to get the helpdesk/webmaster a list of applications and the correct URL's in case some users contact them.
Two major schemas are left on Wilb now - Admissions and Public_relations (calendar events). Summer is in the process of rewriting the admissions application. Moving it would just be too much work, and it really needs a good rewrite. It was written using WebDB. Ron S. is working on the public relations calendar.
Next week, we are going to replace more of the re-directs with notices. Also, we will go through all the Wilb schemas again and make sure we haven't overlooked any. If time allows, we'll put together a comprehensive list of schemas/apps and their correct URL's.
Posted by rossm at 2:06 PM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2006
Another Good Rush Week
Well, here I am tempting fate again, but the Bookstore is finishing up another Rush Week, and things have been mighty quiet (knock on wood) with one exception. You may recall that last year we had a terrible time when two modems decided to die at the same time thereby leaving us with no way to verify credit cards except to call in by hand for each customer - a very bad situation. Well, on Monday as I was checking out our credit card stuff, our backup modem just conked out - dead as a doornail! Fifteen minutes later a replacement was ordered from MBS and Tuesday morning it was received and replaced well before 11:00 a.m. As it turned out, we didn't need to use the backup, but there was no way I was leaving us open for a repeat of the double modem failure. Today, the extra registers will be put away until next term.
This might be a good time to mention that we are considering upgrading to a web based credit card verification service, which would eliminate the need for the modems......
Posted by rossm at 9:47 AM | Comments (0)
Chasing Admissions, Looking at Longs
This week Dale and I worked again on settling down the admissions application so it was at least presentable. Although we were able to get most of the images transferred to the secure folder, there are a couple WebDB references still out there somewhere that are causing minor trouble. Travis installed the new SSL Certificate and that major error is now history. Troy helped us out by creating an image folder on Wilbur.
One of the greatest frustrations with the legacy WebDB applications is that several of the tables contain long data types. I have discovered a relatively simple way to at least view a piece of the long data. Read on to see how...
Long data types were available up to about Oracle 8i when they got replaced by LOB's (CLOB's and BLOB's). Long data types had a lot of disadvantages and were quite difficult to work with. Nothing has happened to make that any easier except for the to_lob() function available in Oracle 9i and on.
To view long data, you first create a table that contains the new CLOB (BLOBs are binary LOBs) datatype:
create table lobo (itemid number, itemdesc clob);
What we will do is insert into lobo the long from a table and use the to_lob() function, like this:
insert into lobo
select app_template_id, to_lob(the_value)
from webdb.wwv_usr_app_template_details$
[the_value is the column name of the long datatype]
Now, from a command line we'll select * from lobo and get a result like this:
ITEMID ITEMDESC
---------- --------
12019 <HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>#
</HEAD>
<BODY BG
This is as far as I got. You can see that you're only getting a peek at the long data, not the entire thing. But, hey, you can see something!
Posted by rossm at 8:40 AM | Comments (0)