Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

A colleague of mine just found a hex dump utility for Linux. You may never need it, but when you do, you probably need it badly! xxd creates a hex dump of a given file or standard input. It can also convert a hex dump back to its original binary form. So you can use it similar to uuencode and convert binaries to ASCII-safe attachments, or use it to patch binary files. We use it to check and see if disks are already used as ASM volumes or not. Just looking at the MBR or boot sector of a disk says enough. dd if=/dev/sda count=1 2>/dev/null | xxd

There are at least 2 version of the new iDRAC, Dell's remote server management and monitoring vehicle. Documentation from Dell lists the differences between the two and the older BMC interface.

Puppet from Reductive Labs : "Puppet is a model-driven open source framework designed to efficiently manage data center infrastructure. It’s the Sys Admin’s best friend, reducing error counts and downtime, saving countless hours and providing significantly higher service quality. Puppet lets Sys Admins spend less time on mundane tasks and instead focus on managing their infrastructure as a whole." Based on a tip from yo61.com.

I've been diving a bit into the RAM configuration of our new R710 Dell servers. They have new memory configuration settings. "Memory Optimized" mode can yield a 50% performance improvement at no cost other than to place DIMMs in appropriate slots. Dell has a white paper detailing the options a bit more: Optimizing DDR3 Memory Settings in New 11th-Generation Dell PowerEdge Servers . It also lists trade-offs of choosing one configuration over the other or when to go for a balanced intermediate.

I've started work on a DRAC wiki hosted on wikidot.com. Since the source code to DRAC was discovered on Dell's servers, a recent flurry of activity on the PowerEdge mailing list showed that there is great interest in this and a lot of confusion about how, what and where?

Gavin Burns, from I Do Linux has a useful tip that you can use to upgrade of flash your servers BIOS and/or firmware. These utils are often DOS floppy images. Besides not having a floppy anymore these days, getting the server to boot a floppy image can present challenges too. Dell's DRAC often eludes me because the boot order won't choose the floppy (unless I hit F11 to get the boot menu, of course). From the article Create DOS Boot Disk for CD or GRUB you'll learn to get the DOS floppy image and create a bootable ISO from it. You can burn the ISO to CD or use the boot image to add a GRUB menu option. Handy!

In compliance with GPL license used by Dell to create DRAC, Dell finally made the source code of their web-based remote server management interface available on their website . It used to be available only after explicit requests. DRAC is built on BusyBox Linux , as reported here earlier.

OraclePartnerNetwork has created a series of videos on YouTube about Oracle VM 2.2 . They vary from installing Oracle VM, creating a VM, to live migration, enabling HA, etc.

I'm in the middle of creating a deployment image of OEL 5u3 (based on RHEL5u3) for new Dell PowerEdge R710 servers. After creating a generic and untested setup for the BIOS, my VMware guy came and informed me that vSphere 4 recommendations list to disable memory interleaving. Generally, letting NUMA do its thing yields better performance. So I'm now checking whether or not use interleaving for my 32 GB servers or to use NUMA out-of-the-box on Linux 2.6.18 as shipped with OEL5u3. I could switch to " Optimizer Mode " for the 32 GB but I'll need to have all servers physically checked and DIMMs reseated. So I opted for Interleaving to hope and try to gain some performance increase. Now I find out NUMA could be better and it is supported from RHEL5, which each update improving on it. I'll have to run more tests to be sure but for now I'm glad I discovered I could enable NUMA on OEL4u5 or higher as well, using a kernel option at boot time. Be sure to check nu...

How does ordinary virtualization relate to virtualization used in a cloud computing environment? That was the topic of a talk at the Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara last week. Is there a difference? Or is it merely a logical or organizational distinction but the techniques used are still the same? Adam Hawley talked about this , slides linked to in the article, and how Oracle's products do or will fit into this paradigm. Database services in the cloud, Application Server services in the cloud, middleware provisioning in the cloud for yourself and your customers, isolation, privacy, security, replication, disaster management. Everything is still the same yet different.

Once again I am running into the weird issue where at install time my NICs are enumerated one way and after a reboot another. This first happened to me in 2007, while installing Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 4u5 on a Dell PowerEdge 2950. The on-board NICs were numbered 'gb1' and 'gb2' but enumerated 'eth1' and 'eth0', respectively. Strangely, the problem went away silently and just now reappeared in OEL 5u3. Today I am using new R11 servers from Dell, the R710 with two dual on-board Broadcom NICs as well the quad-NIC add-on from Intel. At boot, my 'eth0' seems to be what I expect it but after a reboot it becomes 'eth4'. Found an updated white paper from Dell, listing a work-around: nic-enum-whitepaper-v4.pdf .

On Wim Coekaerts Blog I read that Zend and Oracle are working closer together. This makes PHP/Zend Server more integrated with Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL). Zend Server is a complete, Oracle-enabled, enterprise-ready Web application Server for running and managing PHP applications that require a high level of reliability, performance and security. Connectivity to Oracle databases is delivered out of the box. We have a long history of working with Zend and the PHP community to ensure that the latest and greatest Oracle features are available in the PHP database connectivity libraries. Oracle now hosts an rpm package on their ULN servers called zend-server-repo , which updates yum to also look at the software repositories hosted by Zend. (Note: you may need to use a proxy server to get to it, if you have ULN locally mirrored, or mirror the Zend repo as well!) When a user wants to install Zend Server, just a simple command will install the zend-server product directly. FYI, the zend rp...