UI issues with Oracle Endeca Experience Manager

Problem:

I recently fired up an Oracle Linux 6.6 VM with 2.6.32-504.el6.x86_64 kernel. Installed Oracle commerce on the same and a crowd of other necessary software on the same using my custom puppet modules. When I deployed the default CRS endeca application and ran the baseline update and then tried to just browse through experience manager @ localhost:8006 I had trouble seeing contents under the firefox frame except for the application name and home icon header.

Solution:

I knew it was related to flash and so tried to do a lot of things even though my BCC with flash worked like charm - 

1. Uninstalled and installed firefox using YUM - did not work

2. Uninstalled and installed flash plugin using YUM - did not work

3. Restarted firefox, restarted VM after every try of step1 step2 - did not work

4. YUM erase firefox and flash-plugin, restarted VM installed both - did not work

5. Thought may be its an issue with the version of Firefox/Flash plugin, tried to lookup the Oracle Commerce supported environment matrix and validated and installed the exact same versions - did not work

6. With all the above combinations - redeployed and ran baseline almost every time - did not work

7. For one last time, ran YUM erase firefox and flash-plugin, restarted VM, installed firefox and flash-plugin (latest versions - Firefox (38.5 ESR), Flash plugin (11.2.202.559)), went ahead and stopped all endeca processes - PlatformServices, ToolsAndFrameworks, CAS. Renamed the workspace/state folder from all three, and restarted all 3 services again (ToolsAndFrameworks complained about non availability of state - created an empty folder to check - and it started). Ran a fresh new endeca deploy of CRS and ran a baseline and now everything worked as expected. So the issue doesnt seem to be flash but something else but wasnt able to understand as there wasnt much information in the UI.

dgidx: error while loading shared libraries: libaio.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Problem:

When I tried to fire up a baseline update on my CRS Endeca application, I got the following error in my Dgidx.*.log file inside <ENDECA_BASE>/apps/CRS/logs/dgidx

dgidx: error while loading shared libraries: libaio.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Solution:

First as soon as I saw this I tried to install the missing library libaio.so using my package manage (YUM on Oracle Linux)

yum install -y libaio.so

That definitely installed something but the error doesnt seem to have gone yet because I should have installed libaio as a package as against just installing the library file with a .so extension, so tried the following again and the baselineUpdate was able to get past the indexing process to deploying the index to my Authoring and Live MDEXes

yum install -y libaio

WARNING: Unable to retrieve host 'ITLHost' associated with custom component

Problem:

When I was trying to deploy the CRS app that come with ATG11.1 on my linux box I got the following warning

WARNING: Unable to retrieve host 'ITLHost' associated with custom component 

Solution:

On looking at the Appconfig.xml and related configuration files, I found out that the warning occurred because the definition of ITLHost was happening in DataIngest.xml but it was used in WorkbenchConfig.xml which was imported before DataIngest.xml in Appconfig.xml, see below the CRS Default definition of Appconfig.xml 

  <spr:import resource="InitialSetup.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="DgraphDefaults.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="AuthoringDgraphCluster.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="LiveDgraphCluster.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="LiveAppServerCluster.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="UsageCollectionConfig.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="WorkbenchConfig.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="ReportGeneration.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="DataIngest.xml" />

  <spr:import resource="AssemblerConfig.xml" />

So changing the order of imports as follows, fixed that warning, when I tried to a new endeca deploy. See updated Appconfig.xml below..

  <spr:import resource="InitialSetup.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="DgraphDefaults.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="AuthoringDgraphCluster.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="LiveDgraphCluster.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="LiveAppServerCluster.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="UsageCollectionConfig.xml" />

  <spr:import resource="DataIngest.xml" />

  <spr:import resource="WorkbenchConfig.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="ReportGeneration.xml" />
  <spr:import resource="AssemblerConfig.xml" />