Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

We discovered a serious issue when rescanning the SCSI bus on (Oracle/Red Hat) Linux to discover newly added LUNs and I thought I'd mention it here. Our (old) Dell PowerEdge 2950 come with virtual media to allow mounting virtual floppy images (for driver disks, e.g.) and virtual CDs (great for ISOs). Dell adds these devices to the USB SCSI bus and therefore they show up as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb . I.e. before any regular (boot) media. While it makes sense, it creates a problem for us when adding new SAN LUNs to an existing Oracle database server, because we need to add some ASM disks. When doing the bus rescan echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host3/scan the virtual media get enumerated again as sda and sdb , which throws off existing device mapping. Our boot LUN which was sdb is now sdd and that used to be an ASM disk. After initialization with ASM, my boot LUN gets wiped and things get ugly. No root device, read-only access and upon reboot grub fails because boo...

Oracle Linux Tests are designed to verify Linux kernel functionality and stability essential for the Oracle Database. The Oracle Linux Test (OLT) kit , which is distributed as a set of rpms, provides an automated mechanism to define, execute and analyze tests. The kit contains tools such as DBT2 and DBT3 workloads against Oracle single instance or clustered databases, as well as specialized workload simulators. OLT can be used for running tests on Oracle Enterprise Linux, RHEL and SLES distributions and a variety of topologies (storage attached network, network attached storage).

A few days ago we released Oracle VM 2.1.5 which is available for download (registration free but required). This release contains the following : bugfixes on both Oracle VM Manager and Oracle VM Server side the new webservices interface which I wrote a blog entry about, a few weeks ago external data-collector cronjob/thread moved into the Oracle VM Manager instance minor cosmetic improvements on the Oracle VM Manager side This is a full CD release. So it is possible to do an install from scratch starting with 2.1.5, both the management and server side. Source: Oracle VM 2.1.5 (Wim Coekaerts Blog)

TortoiseSVN : "A new version of TortoiseSVN is available: version 1.6.3, linked against Subversion 1.6.3. This is a bugfix/maintenance release only and includes many bugfixes in both TortoiseSVN and the svn library."

I've been searching for an easy way to rename 38 mediawiki tables in MySQL using phpmyadmin, but I failed. You can rename databases but not tables. Copy yes, rename no. Weird. Anyway Pool of oblivion provided me with a lifesaver PHP script to rename multiple tables in MySQL database . The script lists a way replace a pattern with a new pattern. So you need to change the line that builds the new table name if you just want to prefix or postfix a table name with a set string (as I did). I'll include that code here, for your convenience: // replacement $new_table_name = str_replace ( $pattern, $new_pattern, $table_name); //prefix //$new_table_name = $new_pattern . $table_name; // postfix aka suffix //$new_table_name = $table_name . $new_pattern;

Although I'm using Oracle's Linux in the data center at work, I still keep up with other distributions. Just to check out what's going on and keep up. Lately, I've been playing with a new MediaWiki virtual appliance (VA) at work - where we keep most rough documentation and work-in-progress before moving it over to MS Word offial reports - and I must say turnkeylinux.org builds some mean VAs using Ubuntu JeOS. A 180MB ISO file is all you need. You create a VM, mount the ISO, boot, enter some root passwords and your set. It's integrated with Webmin, so you can completely configure the VM using your browser. No need to ssh into anything. :) Kudos! Anyway, I was going to install VMwareTools into the VM and remembered VMware had opened an apt-style repository for VMwareTools for use with Debian-based Linux distributions. So I made a few changes to the VM and installed it using apt-get! Wow! I love Debian, did I mention that before. ;) Here is what I did: wget http://p...

Dell has released OMSA 6.0.2 for monitoring and remotely managing Dell PowerEdge servers that run Linux. Plugins for Nagios, MOM and others exist, so you can tie your Linux servers to most corporate tools.

At work I run a lot of Linux servers with Oracle Linux (OEL, Red Hat-derived) and our Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers have no problems with them. At first, OEL 4u5 had a terribly confusing issue with device enumeration where the first on-board NIC (labeled 1) would end up as eth1 and the other (labeled 2) would become eth0. That was fixed later on and I've reported on it here, 2 years ago. Lately, I've been playing with other Linux distos and seeing how well the (old) Dell servers hold up new distributions. I always used netimages where I install the OS over the network. For one, this greatly speeds up the ISO download and it also ensures I have an updated system after installation ready for testing. While Red Hat and SUSE-based distos are not a problem, Debian-based versions can be. This mainly has to do with the strict philosophy of their maintainers that non-free drivers and firmware should not be included in the image. In my case, the lack of built-in Broadcom (bnx2) drivers ca...

An interesting read from Slashdot mentioned a company YippieMove who switched from VMware to FreeBSD Jails when their infrastructure ran into so many problems doing I/O that something had to change. Interestingly, BSD Jails resembles Solaris' Zones and Linux vservers . Bottom-line is that, as the comments mention very well, you have to “know your workload before picking the technology.” Also, which hardware generation you run VMware on has a big impact. Newer hardware has a significantly better support for virtualization when compared to older generation hardware. We've had similar I/O problems with NFS shares exported to various bare metals (BMs) and VMs and we choose to move to an ECM NAS instead (based on the number and the volumes of the shares). I doubt installing vSphere 4 on our old PowerEdge 2950 would make any difference as the old hardware is simply already stretched to its limits.