Oracle Critical Patches

It was critical patch Tuesday this week. Because of the time differences between here and the USA we actually only get to find out about the critical patches on Wednesday, though there is a pre release announcement.

With software as complex as Oracles you can pretty much guarantee that there will be serious bugs somewhere in there which need patching every quarter.

Considering the types of organisations that run Oracle - the ones who can afford to pay the license fees, i.e. rich and powerful ones, you can be sure that someone is looking into what changed for each release, and how they can benefit from stealing or changing information.

Install Jenkins. Automatically?

The documentation for Jenkins is pretty sparse, but fortunately a colleague had set up Jenkins already, and was able to give me some pointers.

The idea is to use the Apache web server as a reverse proxy to access Jenkins. This can also take care of user authentication.

Prerequisites

So first of all download Java from Oracle. I download it manually and keep it in case the link changes. I use the RPM and install it with yum. Note that there isn’t an easy way to automate this. There is no repository for Java which means you have to check every quarter, when Oracle release their Critical Patches then download and update it.

Automating The Build of New Environments.

The Problem

I look after a Peoplesoft Campus Solutions system, which we call CamSIS. This is the student records system for the University of Cambridge. It is a pretty important system, as it is core to the mission of the University. This means that there is always some kind of work going on to improve it, upgrade it, or add new functionality.

Having a lot of changes, and work going on means there are a lot of test, development and training environments. Normally there are about 20, during large projects there can be even more than this.