Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Wouldn't it be great if you could use the LCD on a Dell PowerEdge to display the names of the VMs running on it? You may never to know where a VM actually, but if you do, you usually need it badly. Well Nickapedia wrote the script and the HOWTO for you: Dell Server LCD Update Script . It uses Dell OMSA on ESX and IPMI to get access to the VM names and then outputs these on the LCD. Brilliant! See video on YouTube ! BTW: won't work on ESXi because OMSA is not supported there.

Been testing my new Oracle Linux stack based on RHEL 5.3. We have a lot of problems with sysops and admins editing files to fix problems. Only recently we started using subversion for release management so we can check for specific versions and verify the (unmodifed) integrity on files. Subversion will also let those sysops and admins commit their changes back into subversion, so changes get documented, verified, discussed and distributed through bug fix releases. However, OEL/RHEL 5 comes bundled with AIDE - Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment and I've started running tests on my test servers. When you initialize the AIDE database as part of the final post installation steps, you run aide -i . This creates base reference database - aka snapshot - of all files that you use later on for any modifications. Using aide -u you update that db. Small problem is that you may a lot of lgetfilecon_raw failed errors. In my case, this had to do SELinux being disabled and aide checking ...

There's a big discussion going on at my workplace about virtualizing Oracle databases. It used to be not done because of performance, but it offers many really useful features such as hardware independence, fail-over, VMotion and cloning, vmdk copies, etc. Oracle had previously told us they supported Oracle in VMs. When they announced Oracle VM Server based on Xen, they retracted this statement. We weren't impressed. Microsoft tried to do the same things while they were working on Hyper-V and so on. Eventually, anti-monopoly laws forced them to support competitors in the same way as they support their own virtualization flavor. So I expect Oracle to do the same. In the mean time... we're playing with Oracle Xen thingy as well as investigating virtual databases running on VMware 4.0 aka vSphere .

Drizzle : "The Drizzle project is building a database optimized for Cloud and Net applications. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-core architecture. The code is originally derived from MySQL."

We are trying to create some common ground between Solaris and Linux environments. For example, auto mounting scripts of NFS file systems. One issue was that Sun uses the master map file called auto_master whereas Linux defaults to auto.master . Thankfully, you can tweak /etc/sysconfig/autofs and use MASTER_MAP_NAME to tell Linux to also use auto_master . Problem solved! Update: dont' forget to open /etc/nsswitch.conf and edit the line for autofs . I had to delete nisplus .

CollabNet has released binaries of Subversion 1.6.1 for all major platforms: Windows, Linux, Solaris and OS X. The Windows client is also already updated, other should follow soon. SVN 1.6 is a big step forward in the area of collaborative development as merging has been improved over 1.5 and very much so from 1.4. More tools building upon SVN are also appearing, expanding the functionality of the plain SVN server with things like ALM , Agile support and more.

Slashdot : "Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt." Note: Oracle's server is currently Slashdotted. LOL

Looking for Red Hat support but can't afford it? But into Oracle's Unbreakable support. Looking for Oracle's support but don't want to pay for it? Look into CentOS! CentOS 5.3 was just released , bringing the Enterprise-style disto on par with RHEL 5.3 for the latest hardware and driver support with major manufacturers.

We currently use SVN to enable us to do release management of deployments. The SVN server holds all our kickstart, post installation and configuration scripts, as well as distribution scripts for software packages (Oracle database, application server, OEM, the OEM agent and more). The actual packages are not in SVN but on an NFS server. CollabNet released a new version of Subversion (SVN) a few days ago. And I'm excited! Subversion 1.6 introduces several new features, including improved authentication (Apache + LDAP) and file system storage as well as better handling of tree conflicts. Check the release notes for full details. The new version also introduces a new public way to reference the history of the repository. You can now read older versions of files through the web interface without the need for a SVN client. This enables 3rd party tools do innovative things through an easy to use interface into SVN.