Putting my DB / Apex install through the wringer

I was mucking around trying to get APEX on one of my PCs to be visible on the internet.

This was just a proof-of-concept, not something I intend to actually leave running.

EPG on Port 8080

I do other testing on the home network too, so I already had my router configured to forward port 80 to another environment. That meant the router's web admin had been shifted to port 8080, and it wouldn't let me use that. Yes, I should find a open source firmware, but OpenWRT says it is unsupported and will "brick the router" and I can't see anything for Tomato.

So I figured I'd just use any incoming router port and forward it to the PC's 8080. I chose 6000. This was not a good choice. Looks like Chrome comes with a list of ports which it thinks shouldn't be talking http. 6000 is one of them, since it is supposed to be used for X11 traffic so Chrome told me it was unsafe and refused to co-operate.

Since it is a black-list of ports to avoid, I just happened to be unlucky (or stupid) in picking a bad one. Once I selected another, I got past that issue.

My task list was:

Server

1. Install Oracle XE 11gR2 (Windows 64-bit)
2. Configure the EPG for Apex. I ran apex_epg_config.sql as, I had switched straight from the pre-installed Apex 4.0 to 4.2.5 rather than upgrading a version I had actively used. 
3. Unlocked the ANONYMOUS database account
4. Checked DBMS_XDB.GETHTTPPORT returned 8080 

(At this point, you can test that you have connectivity to apex on the machine on which XE / Apex is installed, through 127.0.0.1 and localhost).

Local Network

1. Enabled external access by setting DBMS_XDB.SETLISTENERLOCALACCESS(false); 

(Now you can test connectivity from another machine on the same local network through whatever hostname and/or IP address is assigned to that machine, such as 10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x)

Remote Network

• I got a handy Dynamic DNS via NoIP because my home IP can potentially change (though it is very rare). [Yes, there was a whole mess about Microsoft temporarily hijackinging some noip domains, but I'm not using this for anything important.] This was an option in my router setup.
• The machine that runs XE / Apex should be assigned a specific 192.168.1.nnn IP address by the router (based on it's MAC address). This configuration is specific to the router hardware, so I won't go into my details here. But it is essential for the next step.
• Configure the port forwarding on the router to push incoming traffic on the router's port 8088 off to port 8080 for the IP address of the machine running XE / Apex. This is also router specific. 

When everything is switched on, I can get to my Apex install from outside the local network based on the hostname set up with noip, and the port configured in the router. I used my phone's 3G internet connection to test this. 

Apex Listener

My next step was to use the Apex Listener rather than the EPG. Oracle have actually retagged the Apex Listener as RDS (Restful Data Services) so that search engines can confuse it with Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service).

This one is relatively easy to set up, especially since I stuck with "standalone" mode for this test. 

A colleague had pointed me to this OBE walkthrough on Apex PDF reports via RDS, so I took a spin through that and it all worked seamlessly.

My next step would be a regular web server/container for RDS rather than standalone. I'm tempted to give Jetty a try as the web server and container for the listener rather than Tomcat etc, but the Jetty documentation seems pretty sketchy. I'm used to the thoroughness of the documentation for Apache (as well as Oracle).