A collage of file transfer hell

Today I had the pleasure of getting an 15GB image of RedHat with Oracle UCM installed up and running on one of the development boxes we have in a data centre, deep in the guts of the building. It should be a relatively easy task, only I do not have access to the data centre and so have to send files and operate it remotely. It is quite ridiculous the steps that have to be taken to get even close to getting this up and running.

To get at the image, I needed to install VMWare 1.08. I tried with the latest version 2, but it failed due to various windows server 2003 bugs. It kept saying “The System Administrator has set policies to prevent this installation”. Very annoying. Despite having over 1Gb of free space, I couldn’t seem to get the installer going.

But to even get to the point of actually installing stuff I had to get files there. This is probably the single most irritating thing to sort out. Accessing machines you cannot see is laced with trouble. I even installed Apache on my local machine due to lack of ping traffic to the remote server and tried to download from mine own PC having logged in remotely. To no avail.

I installed DownThemAll download manager extension in Firefox to get an earlier version of VMWare, since their website would never let me download more than about 1MB, then spent the next 3-4 hours transferring the image over the network. Needless to say, this did not work. Multiple GB image files are unhelpful to say the least.

Once I got the images over to the server, getting VMWare to load them was pretty simple really. I just pointed it at the .vmx/.vmdk files and it started booting up. One hiccup was logging in to the system once it booted up. I tried various different things, but luckily found that both the username and password was “oracle”.

Once in there wasn’t much to look at. I will look at the installation of UCM itself another day.