Realplayer download

Found a good RealPlayer download site by accident. You won't be bothered with the usual bugging registrations and ads.

http://www.real.com/freeplayer/?rppr=oracle

Oracle documentation

If you move around alot or just don't have the Oracle documentation in your bookmarks, you might get a bit frustrated when going to www.oracle.com and trying to get to the Oracle 9iR2 documentation etc. But I found a nice little page right in the top level domain, where you can navigate to your favourite docs with no problem and probably with only three clicks - and the third one is already in the "Contents" section of your preferred help document.

docs.oracle.com

Other one is a search from all the major products documents:

http://tahiti.oracle.com/

ORA-12638 Credential retrieval failed

Trying to install Ora9iR2 and the server installation was already completed - the Installer was already at the Configurations and the weirdest thing happened - error in the title came from nowhere.

In short, I yelled, I googled and here it is - you have to go to your ORA_HOME\network\admin\sqlnet.ora and change the following line

SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES= (NTS)

into this

SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES=(NONE)

It disables the OS-based authentication, I think. That's why it failed. I didn't have oracle user named the same as my OS user..


Or maybe I'm completly on the wrong tracks - but it works, so I don't care as much anymore. (Well, I'd like to care, but there really isn't that much time in my hands, so I'll postpone the thorough investigation to the next time this happens :) )

How to manually remove Oracle 9i in WIndows

• Uninstall all Oracle components using the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI).
• Run regedit.exe and delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/ORACLE key. This contains registry entires for all Oracle products.
• Delete any references to Oracle services left behind in the following part of the registry:
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/Ora*
  It should be pretty obvious which ones relate to Oracle.
• Reboot your machine.
• Delete the C:\Oracle directory, or whatever directory is your ORACLE_BASE.
• Delete the C:\Program Files\Oracle directory.
• Empty the contents of your c:\temp directory.
• Empty your recycle bin.

At this point your machine will be as clean of Oracle components as it can be without a complete OS reinstall.

Remember, manually editing your registry can be very destructive and force an OS reinstall so only do it as a last resort.