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MetaLink, we barely knew ye

Submitted by jkstill on Mon, 2009-11-09 21:11

But, we wish we had more time to get better acquainted.

If you work with Oracle, you probably know that MetaLink went the way of the Dodo as part of an upgrade to My Oracle Support during the weekend of November 6th, 2009.

And so far it hasn't gone too well, as evidenced by these threads on Oracle-L:

Issues with My Oracle Support
Metalink Fiasco

Many people were lamenting the loss of MetaLink well before its demise, but I don't think any were quite expecting the issues that are currently appearing.

A few have reported that it is working fine for them, but personally, I have found  it unusable all morning.

At least one issue with MetaLink appears to have been cleared up with MOS, that is while I was able to login to it last week.

During a routine audit of who had access to our CSI numbers, I came across a group of consultants that were no longer working for our company, and froze their accounts.  The next day I received a frantic voice mail  from a member of the consulting firm, and he informed me that they had no access to MetaLink because I had frozen their accounts.

I returned the call just a few minutes later, but they had already been able to resolve the issue, as one of their consultants with admin rights had been unaffected, and was able to unfreeze their accounts.
Removing them from the CSI is the better procedure, but in the past when I have attempted to do so, I found that there were still open issues owned by the accounts, and could not remove them. The application owners had been very clear that this access should be removed, so I froze the accounts, so that is what I did on this occasion as well.

This all seemed quite bizarre to me.  This must be a very strange schema in the ML user database, and some strange logic to go along with it.  By granting a user access to a CSI, MetaLink was giving me Carte Blanche to effectively remove them from MetaLink.
How has My Oracle Support fixed this?  Try as I might, I could not find a 'freeze' button in user administration in MOS.  So the fix seems to have been "remove the button"