RE: Great story! Metalink down caused inhouse crash

That must be so true!
Great story! Thank you for sharing.

Igor Neyman, OCP DBA
ineyman_at_perceptron.com

-----Original Message-----
Jay Hostetter
Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 1:29 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

No wonder MetaLink is slow - it's too busy serving up graphics to customer installations.

>>> bbellow_at_chi.navtech.com 11/07/03 11:44AM >>>
At my last project, we were putting in OraFin and we had a team of Oracle
consultants doing up the front-end setup stuff (populating screens, etc).
Well, one day, I get this panicked call that "the system" was down. Well,
of course, that was silly. The system was up just fine, thank-you-very-much, and the database was fine, and even "my" version of the
app was just fine-and-dandy. This reminded me of the old lightbulb joke ("I
got one over here just like it and it works fine for me"), so I tried to log
in as the user from "my" app, and it worked fine. I went upstairs, and sure-nuf, she couldn't log in and couldn't log in. She *swore* she had never logged onto Unix and had never changed *anything* except data, and it
was working fine til 9:15 then boom! Well, after awhile, I ran out of ideas
and tried to log a TAR, and, as you can tell from the subject line, Metalink
was down. It was down all morning, and started coming up slowly around 1pm.
When I was finally able to enter the text of the TAR, I was just about to
log the TAR and my phone rang with a "Gee, you fixed it, thank you!". Well,
*that* was a bit too much of a coincidence for me. Well, the upshot of the
whole thing was that, for whatever reason, in their setups, they wanted the
actual Oracle splash page to come up instead of the one that ships with OraFin and one of their in-house experts who had since disappeared had hardcoded in the server that hosted Metalink into the app.

And the really great thing was when I took out the reference to that machine
leaving the default splash screen as was, they didn't even notice. What a
day that was!

Bambi.

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-- 
Author: Igor Neyman
  INET: ineyman_at_perceptron.com

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