Troubleshooting Questionmark Perception database connections

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We’ve had just about every sort of database connection issue with our two Questionmark Perception servers, so in the interest of saving someone else the kind of struggles we’ve gone through, here are some things to look for.

  1. tnsnames.ora issues:
    There is a file that lives in a subdirectory of the Oracle folder – this directory may be called Oracle_Home, Oracle9 etc, and is often but not always in the root directory of the server.

    A typical path to the tnsnames.ora file on a server is

    E:\Oracle_HomenetworkAdmintnsnames.ora

    There are a variety of things that could be incorrect in this file.

    1. Hidden control characters brought in during copy and paste:
      If you copy and paste the settings from some email programs into this file, you may be adding hidden control characters to the tnsnames.ora file. You won’t be able to see them but they’re there, and they’re screwing things up.

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Conditional SSI

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I was having trouble writing a javascript that sniffs the browser for IE or non-IE, then selects a server side include (SSI) based on the result.

It turned out that you cant do that with javascript: first of all it seems to mis-read the include string:

document.write('<!--# include virtual="includes/safety.htm" -->');

The browser sees this as comment and lops everything off after the (‘ even though the string has quotes around it. If I use a to escape the ! as !, then it simply writes the whole string out to the page, rather than interpreting it.

Apparently this is because SSI’s are evaluated on the server, so they are already executed before the browser renders the page – so by the time my page gets rendered, it’s too late.

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Passing a variable in the URL to turn on and off layers in another page

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I have a series of five flowcharts in a tabbed layout, one flowchart per tab (seem to be doing tabs a lot lately). I wanted the user to be able to click a link on another page, and have the flowchart page open to the correct flowchart layer. A working example is here:

Switch layers on the next page by clicking a link

When I tried setting the value of a variable on the new page, it worked in some browsers but not others, probably because some computers are slower at loading pages than others, and the necessary layers would not be loaded in time for the variable to have something to populate.

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Can not mount Novell server in NetWare for MacOS X

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I had my Mac logging in to the enterprise Novell system with no problems, using Prosoft Engineering’s NetWare for MacOS X v. 1.2.2.

It would mount the various servers I use daily just fine. Then one Monday morning I came in, and nothing would mount, nor could I see them anymore by browsing the tree.

It turned out they had been moved to another tree over the weekend. However I could not see this tree in the NetWare browser, only the old one. I knew the short server name from the notice the Novell team sent out about the migration.
On the ProsoftEngineering site, it says

” To login manually, select the Login tab. You can then manually enter the Username, Password, Tree and Context information. The Tree name should be the IP address or DNS name of the server you want to connect to. You can enter the Context information, or use the Context button to browse for available User Contexts. Please note that if you enter the tree server manually, you must also make this same server a Static SA server in the Directory Services Preferences Panel. ”

So, you can manually log in to a tree that you cannot see by typing its full name into the Tree field on the login screen of Netware. Before doing this be sure to open the NetWare preferences and click user defaults. Make sure Use These As Defaults is not selected. That way it will let you change the login settings.

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