First off, let me say that the bulk of the time I spent on the installation was:
- Uninstalling System 9.3.0
- Copying 11.1.1.2 installation files to the machine (almost 2 hrs!)
- Upgrading SQL Server 2005 to Service Pack 3 (required for XML/A from Reporting Services to work properly)
I finally started the actual 11.1.1.2 installation at about 6 pm. My employee took off to run some errands and said if I needed to reboot, just login using the laptops admin/password. I did the complete installation process under her login and everything was smooth. I started the configuration process and was able to connect to my relational datastore (SQL Server) but was unable to proceed with EAS on port 10080. I instantly remembered this was due to the port issue with AVG antivirus; I blogged on that issue a while back.
I disabled the AVG Web Shield and still, no luck with port 10080. I could have easily continued with another port but, for simplicity, I like to use the default ports. I thought to myself that perhaps a reboot was needed. I rebooted, logged in with our admin username and proceeded to the Configuration Utility. This time, though, was less successful.
After the reboot, I could not, for the life of me, get the Configuration Utility to connect to SQL Server. I did everything including dropping/recreating the SQL Server database. After several tries, I was pretty frustrated. That is when I noticed the command window that launched the Configuration Utility had a stack trace in it. The stack trace showed a Java NullPointerException was being thrown in, get this, the validate() method. Some validation routine that is!
As it was getting to be late, about 8 pm, I decided to call my employee and try just one more time using the employees username/password. It worked! It appears that the Oracle Installer or the Configuration Utility may put some files into the users home directory (or users temp directories) and cannot proceed without those files. Very strange.
Note: In a followup to my AVG post, I also discovered you must disable both the Web Shield and LinkScanner components to free up port 10080.
