Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Someone on the Dell PowerEdge mailing list has written a script that uses SOAP calls to query dell's warranty site . I'm sure it's helpful to someone else to know this.

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

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...

Subversion v1.6.6 has been released. Most relevant changes (IMHO): User-visible changes: * fix crash during 'svn update' (r39673) * respect Apache's ServerSignature directive (r40008, -21, -31) * fix a crash in 'svn rm --force' (r37953) * handle tree conflicts involving replacements (issue #3486) * improve merge performance with implicit subtree mergeinfo (issue #3443) * make file externals work for binary files (issue #3368) * improve "tree conflict already exists" error message (r38872)

If you write code on a regular basis (programs, scripts, tools or installers), chances are you will run into a case where you need to compare 2 or more versions of the same file and find out what their differences are. Diffuse may just save your day at that time!

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."

After 64 bit Flash from Adobe, 64 bit Wine, we now also get 64-Bit Java For Linux ! This 64-bit plug-in is coming as part of Java SE 6 Update 12 Build 02, which was released last Friday. This 64-bit compatibility is for both Linux and Windows, while Sun's own Solaris operating system will pick up the 64-bit support once it has a 64-bit version of Firefox. Yeah, everyone's catching up, finally!

Network World : "Oracle has contributed data-integrity protection code, partly developed with the hardware vendor Emulex, to the Linux kernel, the vendors announced Tuesday. The code helps maintain 'comprehensive data integrity' as information 'moves from application to database, and from [the] Linux operating system to disk storage,' according to a statement. It also lowers the possibility that erroneous data will get written to disk. The companies' effort is meant to help data-center administrators track and address corrupted data quickly, lowering costs and downtime"

Just read a neat trick you can perform with Dell's OMSA software ... You can put the load average of your PowerEdge 2950 into the LCD screen of the server. That way it'll show how busy it is at a glance. First you'll need to figure out how many characters the LCD screen is wide. But let's say it can hold 20 characters, maximum. Then you convert the load average to a single digit using mod 20. Add the remainder of characters into the LCD. Say you have a remainder of 7: omconfig chassis frontpanel config=custom lcdindex=1 text="=======" Cool! BTW, this wasn't mine, I got it from the PowerEdge mailing list! Recommended!

Besides good ol' CVS and the de facto successor Subversion (SVN), the new invention and wide-spread use of distributed version control systems (DVCS) such as Mercurial, Bazaar and git (used for the Linux kernel itself) also have their advantages. For one, iBanjo says you can " suck down the entire history of a Subversion repository into a local, private repository, do all of your commits locally, make branches, experiment all you want, then “push” back up to Subversion again. For those interested in this functionality, there is now a very promising Mercurial to Subversion bridge called hgsubversion . Although still early, the bridge was done right and from the ground up using Subversion's own API and by someone with a good understanding of both svn and hg. The HOWTO is on iBanjo .

That same article on ZDNet.com also mentions that Oracle has begun to think about who it will structure its licensing schema for Cloud Computing (PDF). Other vendors will probably follow soon.

ZDNet.com : "Amazon said on Monday that it will be adding various Oracle enterprise offerings to its cloud computing service, dubbed Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) . The move will give Amazon’s cloud services some serious enterprise heft. In a blog post, Amazon said it will offer EC2 services preloaded with Oracle’s software–Enterprise Linux (OEL), Database 11g, Fusion Middleware, Enterprise Manager and developer tools–as well as support options. For Oracle Enterprise Linux on EC2 there is a combo of the software giant’s Unbreakable Support and Amazon’s Premium Support."

If you manage a few dozen servers or more, maintain a couple of applications or even websites, you owe it yourself to use some kind of Version Control Systems . Something like CVS, SVN or maybe even Git. Alternatively, you can use something like cfEngine to keep all servers configured similarly. However, CVS or SVN can store working versions of all important in one place and provide you will roll-backs if worse comes to worst. Application servers create little config files like crazy and getting a release frozen into SVN, using a subversion tag, can be a life saver at times.

Finally seem to have gotten a stable design for our subversion server in place. Started to import my own scripts, setting properties on files, adding keywords to all my source files, and so on. I am now debating a way for setting and enforcing access control, if any is really needed. I already took a look at the hook templates and checked the subversion mailing list for useful tips and ready-to-use hooks, but instead I found Tigris' own Subversion Tools and Contrib section. This leads to many scripts and hooks, but my problem is that I don't have enough (svn admin) experience to decide which scripts are useful and which aren't. So instead, I'm blogging this here, hoping to return to it later on.

Now that I've been reading up on the use of Subversion (SVN) for SCM and version control, after testing CollabNet's subversion , their CEE integrated SCM toolbox as well the virtual appliance SFEE , I decided to go back to plain Subversion and set that up properly. That is, as far I can without much experience in daily administration, maintenance, etc. Getting ahead of myself, I briefly checked out Warehouse and Lighthouse which add resp. add a visual subversion browser and issue tracker. However, ViewVC does that and is bundled by CollabNet. Lighthouse is for later. However, I think I'll install svnLogBrowser , which let's you visually browse the SVN logs and inspect or monitor change logs. It's much handier than the command line tool and may help getting newbies up to speed.

Ran into a small issue while trying to use system-config-packages to update a test server without mounting the installation CDs actually in a CD-ROM. A 'man system-config-packages' didn't help anything, but an old Fedora mailinglist provided the answer. There is a README on your system that says: redhat-config-packages: This is the primary mode of operation. It is used to install extra packages from package groups included in Red Hat Linux. This uses CDs to install the packages by default. You can instead use a Red Hat Linux installation tree with the option '-tree=/path/to/tree' or use a directory with Red Hat Linux ISO images with the option '--isodir=/path/to/dir'. Of course, using yum may be a better idea as it's better with updates and dependencies, but I didn't find a list of the installable packages that system-config-packages gives you...

Found a useful collection of Subversion Best Practices ... In addition, there is a more practical "getting started with subversion" guide organized in a "how do I" fashion . It also compares CVS commands to their SVN equivalent. Handy!

After a bit of stumbling around and getting confused using 2 versions of subversion, here is how I finally imported our entire RCS repository into Subversion from CollabNet. Prelude: I installed the RPMs from CollabNet as indicated in their readme and used the wizard to config 2 repository. Only thing I added, was to make all the repositories in /var/svn/repositories writable by the group csvn: chmod g+w /var/svn/repositories/* . That way the web server's user/group csvn:csvn can read and write in there. [root@server repositories]# ls -l total 12 drwxrwxr-x 7 csvn csvn 4096 Jun 18 17:54 repo1 drwxrwxr-x 7 csvn csvn 4096 Jun 18 17:54 repo2 [root@server repositories]# which svnadmin /opt/CollabNet_Subversion/bin/svnadmin [root@server repositories]# which cvs2svn /usr/bin/cvs2svn [root@server repositories]# cd [root@server ~]#cvs2svn -s /var/svn/repositories/io_se/ --use-rcs --default-eol=native RCS/ ----- pass 1 (CollectRevsPass) ----- Examining all CVS ',v' files... RCS/la...

Just a note, I'm still in the process of doing this... We decided to switch to a better way of doing SCM (Software Configuration Management) now that we've a major release and more and more people are starting to fiddle (aka mess) with scripts and files. We decided to use Subversion from CollabNet , as a natural successor to CVS. It could also provide corporate support, if needed, and has a nice SourceForge version with web-based GUI and all kinds of handy features. Also, our RCS repository seems to import well into Subversion. Bazaar and Mercurial also seemed to fit, but somehow I thought I would have a much harder time explaining them to the people working with it. The note, while using cvs2svn to import RCS into SVN (using cvs2svn -s /var/svn/repositories/rcs_import --existing-svnrepos --use-rcs RCS ), I ran into an error: " svn: Expected version '3' of repository; found version '5' ". This seems to be due to a schema change between subversion ve...

I've recently had to think about a good technical solution to our Source Code Management (SCM) problems. We're using a central RCS directory tree to handle everything. It started out with just a few scripts and kickstart files we needed to put under revision control , but soon it ballooned (or course)... While I do have some experience with CVS, I heard about Subversion (SVN) and other SCM tools and stumbled upon this comparison of Subversion or CVS, Bazaar or Mercurial . Great read! It doesn't offer a easy solution though, and experience is still the best guide. The difference between open and closed distributed revision control is also a tough decision to make, without solid team experience with either.