Running Enterprise Manager

We now just need to get Enterprise Manager (the browser-based database management tool) working properly.

Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) is reached at the URL shown at the end of the software installation process: it’s usually a https://<name of server>:1158/em address. The trouble is that Firefox will throw a fit the first time you try and visit it:

As it says, there’s a problem with the certificate used to secure this web connection. The simplest way around this is to ignore it: just click the I Understand the Risks option, followed by the [Add Exception...] button. In the new dialog that then appears, click the [Get Certificate...] button and finish off by clicking the [Confirm Security Exception] button, making sure that the ‘Permanently store this exception’ check box is switched on. That should now take you to the OEM login page:

You can log on as the user system here. The password will be whatever you supplied on the Install Configuration screen (step 4 of 8) during the Oracle installation. For now, your connection should be as normal.

There’s a lot of information here about how your database and the server it’s running on is performing, but that’s only the start of things -as you can see, there’s lots of different ‘tabs’ you can click on, such as Performance, Availability, Server and so on. Each tab gives access to a whole raft of administration capabilities. Learning what’s where and how each option can be used to best effect is a whole series of articles in its own right, so I’m not going to get into that now!

I will just mention, however, that you will have problems the first time you try clicking on the ‘Performance’ tab:

As the browser itself tells you, there’s a plugin missing which causes that large grey area to appear where there are supposed to be a bunch of graphs. That’s because you’re running this on a 64-bit Linux machine… and Adobe are a bit slack in providing easily-installable 64-bit Flash plugins for browsers on Linux!

If you click the [Install Missing Plugins] button, for example, Firefox will check if a suitable Flash plugin can be found… and then tell you it’s drawn a blank. If you click the [Manual Install] button at that point, though, you’ll be taken to the Adobe website:

Note the yellow panel there: it’s offering you a way to get the beta 64-bit Flash plugin. Click that link, then find the Download and install the Flash Player “Square” preview release link under the ‘Getting Started’ section. Finally, click on the Download plug-in for 64-bit Linux link and save that somewhere on your system. By default, it will be saved to the oracle user’s Download directory

Installing your download means (1) opening a new terminal window and cd’ing to the <oracleusername>/Downloads directory); (2) unpacking it (tar -xvf flashplayer10_2_p3_64bit_linux_111710.tar.gz); and (3) copying the libflashplayer.so file to the Firefox plugins directory like so:

cp libflashplayer.so /home/hjr/.mozilla/plugins

…though, again, replace “hjr” in that lot with your oracle user account name.

Now re-start Firefox, go back to the Enterprise Manager login screen and re-log on. This time, you should have something meaningful to look at in the Performance tab:

Of course, the whole point of having a browser-based database management tool is that you can run whatever browser you like on any remote PC you fancy and still get the results you require. It’s not strictly necessary for the browser running on the database server itself to be able to display Flash, in other words, because the browser on your host machine should be up to the task. Internet Explorer 9, for example, complains as Firefox does about the dodgy security certificate before it lets you reach the site, but after you tell it to ‘continue to the website anyway’, it works fine. The same is true for Google Chrome.

Still, though you don’t strictly need to get the server’s own browser working right, it can’t hurt to do so!