Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

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.

Another note on using PowerPath in Linux... When using 2 Linux servers and PowerPath with a bunch of shared LUNs in order to build a cluster, e.g. Oracle RAC, you have to ensure that on both servers the LUNs are designated as the same /dev/emcpower* devices. Linux is a bit flaky in device enumeration and often, the order of devices gets mixed up. PowerPath can easily fix this . Use powermt save file=devmap.pp on one host of the cluster and use powermt unmanage dev=emcpower{a,b} and powermt load file=devmap.pp on the other, to make sure they both have the same mapping. Then do a ' powermt save ' to make the configuration persistent. Also, when using LVM in conjunction with PowerPath, you don't want regular SCSI devices (local disks or perhaps iSCSI) to intervene. You can tell LVM to ignore certain devices completely when it comes to LVM. In my case I've included the filters below to make sure Linux VMs and BMs (bare metals) get the proper config. Put this in /etc/lvm...

I've been seeing a weird error on my server console lately. We're using Dell PowerEdge 2950 and 2950 III running Oracle's Enterprise Linux 4U5, source code from RHEL AS 4u5, with no patches applied. Straight "base distribution" (I know, I know, bad idea but bare with me). I reported it to Dell's PE mailing list, but didn't get any conclusive answers. So I'm listing it here, for reference. Sep 1 15:36:26 kernel: hda: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy } Sep 1 15:36:26 kernel: hda: irq timeout: error=0x00 Sep 1 15:36:26 kernel: hda: ATAPI reset complete I've found various reports of similar errors on different hardware but all seem to revolve around Red Hat's 4 release (OEL, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora) with various updates. See [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Some sources say it's a DMA-related issue. Others suggest to turn off ACPI using kernel boot parameters acpi=off and another says it's simply the HAL daemon probing your devices. You can configure the hal...

Cyberciti writes: "Linux desktop user generally uses small hard disk and partition, but on server you need a large partition. For example, you cannot create 4TB partition size (RAID based) using fdisk command. It will not allow you to create a partition that is greater than 2TB. To solve this problem use GNU parted command with GPT. It supports Intel EFI/GPT partition tables. [...] By default Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS comes with GPT kernel support. However, if you are using Debian or Ubuntu Linux, you need to recompile the kernel." Update: Check a good post on IDoLinux about using GPT or LVM to partition file systems, and if you use hardware RAID in your system, do read about optimizing the Linux file system to maximize performance.

Red Hat updates Enterprise Linux to version 5.2 . That means Oracle Enterprise Linux and CentOS are soon to follow... Main improvements are "extensive driver updates", enhanced capabilities including power usage, scalability, and manageability (whatever that means) and increased virtualization support (i.e. Xen). [update: improved PAE support]

Just thought I'd mention this as this is the first time I ran into this... On Oracle Linux, just as on Fedora, CentOS and Red Hat, you usually install software using either up2date (blah) or yum (much better). However, setting up a local mirror for network installs or local updates, is somewhat daunting. Especially when used to the comfortable ease of Debian-based distos as they have all sources available for free on the net. Therefore it nice to know that some dedicated fellows like Dag Wieers use their time to make life a little easier for you. With tools like mrepo: yum/apt repository mirroring (formerly known as 'yam'). I haven't played with this yet, but I'm gonna look into it for sure!

Since updated code released by Red Hat takes some time to reach the public and then takes a few additional days before Oracle can obtain, process, verify and release the updates to their customers, you may be unprotected for a few extra days longer. However, based on experiences with CentOS, this is acceptable.