Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

A Sun Solaris friend of mine looked at me in disgust when he saw my /etc/fstab file to mount NFS mounts, CDs and more. I was seriously hurt so when he explained the shiny happy possibilities of autofs on Solaris (and Linux), I was immediately convinced: Configuration of the Automounter Autofs ... and all was well!

If you care about clustering and currently use VMware, you should read Wim Coekaerts' blog about vCenter Server Heartbeat and Oracle VM Manager with Oracle Clusterware ... I was gonna look into Oracle VM (and Xen) later this year anyway, but may move it up because of this.

Just discovered a fabulous resource for installing and configuring Oracle databases on various OS platforms: ORACLE-BASE . Oracle 9i, 10g, 11g but also RAC on Linux, Microsoft, VMware, Xen, etc. Recommended!

Testing my new kickstart file to install Linux on my old Poweredge 2950 dell servers is fine, but multipath presents me with a new problem. We boot from SAN, even though the servers have local disks available. Eventually we will move towards Blades, so the experience is useful. But each server has a different number of LUNs available to it. The boot LUN is always LUN id 0. Without multipathd , this gave me /dev/sdb as the boot device. With multipathd , this gives me /dev/mapper/mpathX , where X is the number of LUNs I have. You may see the problem: The kickstart file must list the boot drive order and designate a place to put the MBR. However, I can't think of a way to tell kickstart to use the last mpath device... I wish there'd be a way to make /dev/mapper/mpath0 the boot LUN... Update: Well, it seems to be a limitation of multipath support in anaconda. I've booted the OEL 5.3 DVD ISO on 3 different bare metals and each server has a different number of LUNs associated w...

With Red Hat and Oracle Linux supporting multipathed installation from 5 update 2 on, I thought they should have changed the Kickstart Options as well, so that anaconda can be given the right parameters. And I was right. ignoredisks has been added to let the installer ignore SAN disks as well as for cluster setups. multipath has been added to handle dual HBAs cases where the same disk will be seen over two different paths. Update: except ignoredisks , there is really not much you need to do but boot the Linux kernel with the option ' mpath '. The multipath option lets you set/configure the multipath.conf configuration, I believe. Not used yet. In my case, I use this line to boot Linux and start a kickstart installation: linux mpath text nousbstorage ksdevice=eth0 ks=http://server/mpathks.cfg That's it. The first activates multipath-aware option in anaconda. The second uses text mode. The third parameter skips any USB devices in my PowerEdge 2950 (virtual floppy, d...

Dell's OpenManage tools keep some logs under /var/log and do not clean them up. You also can't turn them off and they contain important info from the PERC controllers. Anyway, the mailing list mentions this often, so I thought I post a little solution using logrotate: Dell OpenManage and their TTY logs . /var/log/TTY_*.log { daily notifempty missingok rotate 7 # how many you want to save compress delaycompress sharedscripts postrotate /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d dsm_om_shrsvc restart >/dev/null 2>&1 || true endscript } See also Planet Malaysia .

As we run 700+ VMs in our data center, 40% of which Linux BTW, this news is pretty relevant to me: VMware decided to make their Advanced Technical Trainings (PDF) - mainly used for in-house support staff and engineers - available for free! Previous VCP certification is recommended, or at least thorough experience with VMware. Source: VMware - VMware Partner News