Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

My OEL4 servers still have duplicate RPM packages on 64 bit servers. Libs for 32 bit and 64 bit are often installed, even though they may not always be used. When upgrading a package, such as glibc, you run into the error that yum won't touch a package because it finds duplicates. In this case you can try Removing Duplicate RPM Packages or remove a package using an explicit architecture tag: yum package.{i386,i686,x86_64} such as yum remove glibc.i686 . If you have RHEL/OEL5 or higher, you're in luck because you can try to install the package yum-utils and run package-cleanup --cleandupes . yum-utils offer a bunch of useful tools for working with yum repos and so on.

Besides having the option to download installation media from Oracle (for which you must register), you can use the Oracle Public Yum Server to get packages. For instance, to help solve ad-hoc dependencies. This alleviates you from the need to keep a local mirror available for all Linux releases.

A few days ago, Oracle followed suit by Red Hat and released OEL6. Here are the Oracle Linux 6 Release Notes . At first glance, most notable changes are default ext4 file system. Better performance monitoring and tracking using perf and new user space "top" tools, and it no longer uses up2date but instead relies totally on yum. Yummie! Last but not least: the Unbreakable Kernel kernel-uek-2.6.32-100.28.5.el6 is installed and activated by default! This shouldn't matter much, unless you run the latest state-of-the-art hardware and use SSDs a lot. But 3rd party software vendors may like you stepping away from the Red Hat default kernel-2.6.32-71.el6 kernel. So check first! OL6 is the first Linux distribution from Oracle where they no longer patch the Red Hat kernel. Instead, they provide the Red Hat kernel as-is as an option to be configured for use in /etc/grub/menu.lst. The default kernel in OL6 is the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel that Oracle maintains itself. As far...

I've had a long feud at work with business units who work with outside contractors who insist on writing web apps using the very latest version of PHP, Apache and MySQL. While I welcome the use of open source, state-of-the-art technology, the one thing these contractors often overlook is the need for stability and continuity in enterprise-grade applications. Even web applications. It's useless to use the latest greatest feature set in PHP or MySQL, if the organizations you're targeting are all running RHEL 4u8, 5u2 or even RHEL3! And many do. The Enterprise Distributions for Linux lag behind public version for up to 18 months! And they won't easily upgrade just because you ask or because your application was built using the most recent version of an open source package. The company may be able to give you a special server in some DMZ but you may lack access to certain key servers, because the security status of your app and server have not (yet) been approved. Inste...

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...

Where I had great difficulties trying to get OMSA to install let alone work in Oracle's Enterprise Linux 4 (u5 and above), I am happy to report that I got it working out-of-the-box after an install of my custom 5u3 image, following the instructions on the OMSA Repository Wiki . A simple http proxy setting, the wget boot strap line to configure yum and the dependencies and I was in business! Excellent work, Dell!

Never seen so many IPMI messages flying around on the Dell Linux mailing list. It's an open standard to monitor information of basic health parameters of a server. Here is a very good from by someone from Dell that sums up the usage and support of IPMI under Linux on Dell PowerEdge servers. Basically, you only need ipmitool to issue power on/off the servers. If you want to do more, you need to install the IPMI packages (yum install OpenIPMI)

Oracle has released the Linux base install repositories to the public. This means that, when you have obtained the ISOs for OEL4 or OEL5, you can install packages freely using yum. The so-called "base channels" are available for free and without support over Internet. This applies to Oracle VM (Xen) as well. All you need is their .repo files, yum check-update, and you're set. Updates and Patches require a support license. Check Oracle Public Yum Server for details and howto.

Just received notice that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Beta has been out since October 28th... Sjeez! Why didn't I know that sooner...? Anyway the bèta will last until January 9th, 2009, so when I get from holidays, I'll have my work cut of out for me. RHEL 5U3 brings many, many virtualization (Xen) improvements. A new kernel (kernel-2.6.18-120.el5), rebased versions of monitoring tools (lm-sensors, net-snmp, openIPMI, openldap), new versions of yum and rpm, updated Kerberos subsystem, newer SAMBA (3.0.32) with support for Vista and Windows Server 2008, a ton kernel fixes and features, new hardware drivers (bcm43xx, bnx2/bnx2x, cpufreq, e1000/e1000e, mptscsi, qla24xx, etc.) and some interesting Technology Previews! dm-multipath install, which should allow anaconda to install Linux on systems with 2 or more HBAs. Support for ext4 file systems. CIFS (aka SAMBA) enhancements in the form of kernel DFS support and Kerberos security. Check the complete Release Notes for a full upda...

Cobbler is a Linux installation server that allows for rapid setup of network installation environments. With a simple series of commands, network installs can be configured for PXE, reinstallations, media-based net-installs, and virtualized installs (supporting Xen, qemu, KVM, and VMware Server). Cobbler uses a helper program called 'koan' (which interacts with Cobbler) for reinstallation and virtualization support. Cobbler can also optionally help with managing DHCP, DNS, and yum package mirroring infrastructure -- in this regard, it is a more generalized "provisioning" server, rather than just dealing specifically with installations. It has a command line interface, a web interface, and also several API access options. That sounds like a lot, but it's really pretty simple.

The mailing list noted yesterday that Dell OMSA 5.5 is being tested. "We now have OMSA 5.5 available for testing in the Dell hardware repository. As of OMSA 5.5, yum is now an official distribution method. Due to this, 5.5 will soon move to the 'latest' repo. Please report back any failures or successes. To test the new repository, you can now go directly to http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/OMSA_5.5/ , and follow the instructions. With the new repository tools, you will be able to stay on a specific version of the repository, or stay up to date with the latest packages, by going to the appropriate folder (e.g. 'OMSA_5.5' or 'latest') and bootstrapping the repository."

There was a message from Michael Brown on the Dell PowerEdge mailing list, that I thought is important enough to repeat here as many people may not know about that list. Dell has an active OpenManage infra setup for Linux to help monitor and manage their hardware. As we have their 2950s, I'm monitoring that list. "After several months of work, I am ready to announce a bèta period for the Dell Community Linux repository at http://linux.dell.com/repo/community . When complete, this repository will be the replacement for the current software repository. Please read the details on the repository homepage. I will be running a two week beta period to ensure that the repository is functioning properly. After two weeks, I will redirect software repo bootstrap so that new installs will use the community repo. And two weeks after that, I will redirect all current software repo users to the community repository. Early this year I asked the community if people would be willing to submit...

I have up2date setup for my servers to update most packages but ignore kernel updates as well as oracleasm -related updates. Kernel updates break things and must be done manually, when needed. However, I prefer using yum over up2date. But until now I did not find an easy way to tell yum to ignore updates on some packages. An old Duke mailing list had an improved man yum text that eluded to add multiple exclude=package* statements to the repos in /etc/yum.repos.d/ . Thanks Duke! Here is my example yum repo configuration with the excluded packages: [el4_patch]name=Oracle Enterprise Linux - $releasever - $basearch - patchbaseurl=http://uln.example.com/yum/EL4/$releasever/patch/$basearch/exclude=kernel*exclude=oracleasm*gpgcheck=1enabled=1 Update: something is still not right for it just upgraded the kernel anyway. Update2: When I moved the 'exclude' lines before the 'enabled' line, the yum update process does indeed ignore kernel updates, as expected. Before, I had the...

I accidently did an update of a test server using ' yum update ', realizing I'd get a new kernel but forgetting the new kernel would break my PowerPath setup. It's EMC's software for getting multi-pathing and we use version 5.0.0 (EMCpower.LINUX-5.0.0-157.rhel). I should have used up2date because it knows how to update and skip undesired packages, such as the kernel... Oh well. *Nix hacks had some tips to fix PowerPath after kernel updates . You simply need to reinstall the package and force a replacement.

Oracle has updated the instructions on how to setup a local yum repository for Oracle's Unbreakable Linux program. It's a bit shorter, clearer and the channels are better explained than before. However, if you want have a yum repo mirror that can also utilize ISO images as well as a set of custom RPMs, not normally in the repository, be sure to check out DAG's mrepo instead. Using mrepo, you can have a yum repo, a dir with local, custom RPMs for specific apps, as well as plain straight ISO images. Update: their yum population script was updated again late December.

Liquidat has a tip for when rpm/yum seems to hang up and nothing but a reboot will work. Just delete /var/lib/rpm/__db* and try again. Hmmm, wish I'd known about that a few months ago. Seems a complicated issue with rpm, but rawhide appearantly has a fix for it.

I think I finally managed to solve a really annoying error I get on occasion, but I still don't know what exactly causes it, though. When running yum or up2date to check for and/or update installed packages, I receive the error: up2date A socket error occurred: Timeout Exception and /var/log/up2date shows a serie of timeouts after which up2date just fails. Common attempts to fix it seem to be to check your system date (mine is perfectly synced using NTP); to update your profile on RHN/ULN; to clean the cache using 'yum clean all'; to clear the yum or up2date cache directories and such. None of these fixed it for me. What finally did fix it for me, was to delete /var/spool/up2date ( sudo rm -rf /var/spool/up2date ) and to recreate that same directory again ( sudo mkdir /var/spool/up2date ).

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...

I have been struggling with Dell's OpenManage Server Management a bit lately. Mainly because other people asked me to try it and gave me wrong links to information. So I'll clarify it here, for those getting started as well, and hope it helps someone. Dell Server Management has a lot (!) of components and you don't really need all (or any) of them. But they can be helpful. We'll use it for Server Management , mainly to monitor our PowerEdge 2950 servers but also (hopefully) to unify BIOS settings and DRAC configurations remotely. That's why we need OpenManage Server Administration (OMSA) . OMSA consists of a number of things: - OMSA Server - OMSA Managed Node - OMSA ITA (IT Assistance) You'll only need one server (maybe two for fail-over and redundancy). The easiest way to install the server is add a yum/up2date repo from Dell. but I had trouble finding the "OMSA agent" or "OMSA client" that I'd install on all servers to be monitored by...

Just getting started using Dell's OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) on our Oracle Linux platform. There are some confusing instructions going around so it's not immediately clear what to do, hence my blogging here. :) There is a site on Dell - Hardware Monitoring , as well as a wiki with instruction on how to setup their OMSA tooling using yum or up2date. [update]My first update for their instructions: be sure your server has Internet access, as most servers will use a proxy or so. use export http_proxy=http://yourproxy.example.com:port to configure it just for the session, and setup up2date to use an HTTP proxy by editing the settings in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date .