Whoa, I managed to fix the problem that has haunted me for months! All right, not months, more like weeks. And it didn't really haunt, either. But I'm all about being hyperbolical right now. BTW, I just found out the meaning of diabolical today. All along I thought it had something to do with diarrhea -- my fav excuse for skipping work since it's virtually impossible to prove otherwise. (Fine, I know it has nothing to do with diarrhea -- see above, please.)

Back to the problem. It was a Micro$oft Outlook problem and quite annoying. So annoying that I decided to post a question on the mailing list. Apparently it was so difficult and rare that noone replied. That's the thing about our faculty mailing list. Everyone is always quick when it's politics or religions (or the lack thereof). Funny, because the last time I checked it was still called the Faculty of Computer Science.

Anyway, the problem was that my Outlook always used one outgoing server to send mail. Even when I replied to messages received from other accounts. I even tried setting other accounts as the default and it still used that one server. Fortunately it was my company account. Imagine the clients' reaction upon receiving replies from kampretlusemua@gmail.com. How am I supposed to explain to them what kampret is? I myself am not really sure. A bat? A relative of codot?

Even Google was uncharacteristically giving me no love. Then, more by chance than anything else, I stumbled upon this link. It tells you how to enable logging for Outlook. So I did and found that the messages were indeed sent using the correct SMTP server. Then upon failure (my IP address had changed and our server is configured to allow relaying from certain addresses only) Outlook automatically switched to the next server and tried to re-send. So I updated the filter and now I can send from my primary account. Great!

One mystery remains, though. I'm pretty sure before this started, whenever a message was rejected due to the anti-spam settings, Outlook would not automatically try the next server and simply give an 'undelivered' message. Hmm, now that I thought about it, could my company's SMTP server possibly have rejected the messages as well, hence the 'undelivered' message? I know they reconfigured it recently. Reminds me of this story. And this.

Bear with me, but I have another complaint on Hyperion to air out. After one whole day -- which means 24 hours -- spent to set the Hyperion Performance Suite server up, I happily published OCEs and BQYs. When it was time to test 'em, it failed on me. What a brick.

Hey, that gives me another "what's worse" idea. What's worse than having to install Oracle Database? Having to install Oracle Database and Hyperion Performance Suite. What's worse than that? Having to install Oracle Database and Hyperion Performance Suite on Solaris. Oh, oh, one thing is -- would you believe it -- worse still. Having to install Oracle Database and Hyperion Performance Suite on Solaris without any internet connection. Yeah.

The Hyperion message went like this: Database logon failed. SQL*Net Not Loaded Successfully. Hyperion services were run by 'hyperion' account and from the terminal this user was able to execute queries sucessfully from sqlplus. Oracle executables and libraries were in the PATH.

After I was finally able to access the support site -- it doesn't work on Firefox (version 1.0 has been released!) and is very slow on IE -- a lady told me to check the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable. Which didn't even exist anywhere -- that includes the documentation.

So, following her advice, I added a new line in the set_environment.sh script for LD_LIBRARY_PATH and set it to $ORACLE_HOME/lib, $ORACLE_HOME/lib32, $ORACLE_HOME/network/lib, and $ORACLE_HOME/network/lib32. According to her, Oracle 9.2 is the first Oracle release that by default uses the 64-bit libraries in the 'lib' directory, whereas Hyperion looks for the 32-bit drivers, which are in the 'lib32' directory. Oh, and $BP_HOME/lib is not to be forgotten as well.

So:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/lib32
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/network/lib
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/network/lib32
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$BP_HOME/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Sure 'nuff it worked. Thank you, Lady At Hyperion Support Site.

Happy Lebaran, you guys.

Current music: Technotronic - Move This
Current mood: happy