Video : Install Docker on Oracle Linux 7 (OL7)

Today’s video is a run through installing the Docker engine on Oracle Linux 7 (OL7).

You can get the commands mentioned in this video from the following article.

You can see my other Docker posts and builds here.

The star of today’s video is Robyn Sands, formerly of the Oracle Real World Performance Group, and now something to do with some fruit company… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Video : Vagrant : A Beginner’s Guide

Today’s video is an introduction to Vagrant, which I use to build test systems with VirtualBox.

This video is based on the following article.

The star or today’s video is Christian Antognini, who is being drowned out by the noise of a plane. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Sorry if you kept getting part way through, only to have the video be removed. I kept spotting mistakes, rendering artefacts and strange things YouTube was doing to the uploaded video.

Video : Oracle Linux 8 Installation

Today’s video is a quick run through a manual installation of Oracle Linux 8.

I put out a number of articles about Oracle Linux 8 when the beta was first released. I’ve now updated them where appropriate.

I’ve also gone through my Vagrant builds for 18c on OL8 and 19c on OL8. They work fine, although there isn’t a Vagrant box for OL8 yet, so I had to make my own using the method similar to this.

Remember, OL8 has only just come out, so the database is not certified on it yet. I’ve put at note a the top of the database installation guides saying as much.

The star of today’s video is Mahir M. Quluzade. He was grinning most of the way through filming this. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle 18c and 19c on Oracle Linux 8 (beta)

Fresh on the back of yesterday’s Fedora 30 post, I noticed a post from Avi Miller about the release of Oracle Linux 8 Beta. I had a day off work, so once I had finished the Fedora 30 builds, I started on the Oracle Linux 8 builds.

It should be obvious, but this is a beta release of the OS, so everything below is just me playing. It will all have to be done again, and done “properly” once the final release appears. Even then, it will be a while before anything is certified against the new OS, so don’t take this seriously.

I’ve pushed some stuff up to GitHub. It uses a Vagrant box I created myself, in the same way I wrote about here.

I think it’s time I did something “real”, rather than playing around with stuff that doesn’t relate to something I would do at work. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle 18c and 19c on Fedora 30

As is customary, Fedora 30 has been released and I’ve done some Oracle installations on it.

Before we get to the good stuff, let’s do the warnings.

With that out of the way, here are the articles.

Not surprisingly, things feel pretty similar to Fedora 29 from an Oracle perspective. There are a few small edits to the process due to the package changes with this OS version.

I’ve pushed some stuff up to GitHub, but there is no Vagrant box available for Fedora 30 yet, so I had to create my own, in the same way I wrote about here.

So now you know how to do it, please don’t. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Docker : My First Steps

In a blog post after OpenWorld I mentioned I might not be writing so much for a while as something at work was taking a lot of my “home time”, which might result in some articles, but then again might not… Well, that something was Docker…

After spending a couple of years saying I was going to start looking at Docker, in June I wrote a couple of articles, put them on the website, but didn’t mention them to anyone.  I was finding it quite hard to focus on Docker because of all the fun I was having with ORDS. More recently it became apparent that we have a couple of use-cases for Docker at work, one of which involved ORDS, so it reignited my interest. There’s nothing like actually needing to use something to make you knuckle down and learn it… 🙂

Having gone back to revisit Docker, I realised the two articles I wrote were terrible, which wasn’t surprising considering how little time I had spent using Docker at that point. The more I used Docker, the more I realised I had totally missed the point. I had come to it with too many preconceptions, mostly relating to virtualization, that were leading me astray. I reached out to a few people (Gerald Venzl, Bruno Borges & Avi Miller) for help and advice, which got me back on track…

I’ve been playing around with Docker a lot lately, which has resulted in a few articles, with some more on the way. I’m not trying to make out I’m “the Docker guy” now, because I’m clearly not. I’m not suggesting you use my Docker builds, because there are better ones around, like these. I’m just trying to learn this stuff and I do that by playing and writing. If other people find that useful and want to follow me on the journey, that’s great. If you prefer to go straight to the source (docs.docker.com) that’s probably a better idea. 🙂

I do a lot of rewrites of articles on my website in general. This is especially true of these Docker articles, which seem to be in a permanent state of flux at the moment. Part of me wanted to wait until I was a little more confident about it all, because I didn’t want to make all my mistakes in public, then part of me thought, “sod it!”

If you want to see what I’ve been doing all the articles are on my website and the Dockerfiles on Github.

I’m having a lot of fun playing around with Docker. You could say, I’m having a “whale” of a time! (I’ll get my coat…)

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle 12c on Fedora 27

As always, I have to start with a warning.

With that out of the way…

Fedora 27 has been out for a couple of weeks now, but I’ve not really been able to do anything with it because I couldn’t get it installed on VirtualBox. I finally managed to get the installation to work, provided I used the Live DVD when I was running VirtualBox on an Oracle Linux 7 host. That means I was finally able to have a play with 12cR2 on Fedora 27.

It’s pretty much the same as the installation on Fedora 26.

So now you know how to do it, please don’t! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

 

Oracle 12c on Fedora 26

Before we get into this, I feel the need to mention this important caveat, so I don’t get any grief about this.

With that done, here we go…

Fedora 26 has been out for a while now. As soon as it dropped I tried to do some 12c installations on it and hit a stumbling block. The software would install and link fine, but it wouldn’t start up Oracle processes, so you couldn’t actually create a database using the DBCA or SQL*Plus. I roped in Frits Hoogland to help me find the issue, which he did through the magic of strace. 🙂

With that information, a bit of Googling revealed other software that was struggling with changes to glibc, with the only reliable solution (to their problems) being to downgrade to glibc from Fedora 25. That didn’t sound too satisfactory to me.

If I’m honest, I got kind-of bored by it until Andy Campbell made me aware of a workaround, so I was finally able to get 12cR1 and 12cR2 working fine on Fedora 26.

Not surprisingly, the 12cR1 installation still suffers from that Perl issue on newer chipsets. The 12cR2 installation is a lot clearer by comparison.

So now you know how to do it, please don’t! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Linux Upgrade : It’s a Sorry State!

It’s 2017 and it’s still not possible to reliably upgrade an Enterprise Linux distribution between major versions!

At this point you are scrolling down to the comments to “educate me” about the redhat-upgrade-tool, because you read about it somewhere and you once heard someone successfully upgraded an installation on a lab machine. Unless you have an ultra vanilla starting point, you are going to end up with a mess that probably won’t boot. By the time you come to upgrade a “real server”, there have been years of changes and it is unlikely to resemble some pristine minimal installation.

I know your next comment is going to be something about the architectural changes brought in by project X and version Y in RHEL7, which is why it is all so hard. Stop now! You are boring me already! Is it an enterprise distribution or isn’t it? If it is, you should be able to upgrade it reliably!

Next up comes, “But you have to reinstall when you get new hardware!” I present to you virtual machines. Physical hardware upgrades with no need to reinstall the OS on the VM.

I can’t believe I’ve been using Linux for about 19 years and this is where we are at.

Cheers

Tim…

Spacewalk : My First Steps in Space

spacewalkA few days ago we had a rather unproductive web session at work with an Oracle Linux Support sales team. They were obviously keen to sell us Oracle Linux support contracts and I was keen to only pay if we were getting something of value from the deal.

  • We already use Cloud Control for managing our Oracle Database and WebLogic installations. We are currently transitioning from Cloud Control 12c to Cloud Control 13c. Buying OS support brings nothing to the table here.
  • We have a company policy to use SCOM (and Squared Up) for monitoring, so at this point Cloud Control 13c is never going to be used as a general monitoring tool across the organisation.
  • We do all our server provisioning with VMware vSphere and Embotics vCommander, so Cloud Control 13c will not be used for general VM provisioning tool.
  • We don’t really have a need for Ksplice. I’m not denying it’s a cool piece of kit, but at this point we really don’t need it.
  • We don’t want to rip out all our other tools to replace them with Cloud Control.
  • Although I predominantly work on UNIX and Linux systems, the vast majority of the servers in the company run Windows. As a result, products that suit Windows tend to take priority. 🙂
  • The piece of the puzzle we are really missing is management of Linux patching, repositories, channels etc. After asking several times for some information I got pretty angry and said something to the tune of, “Look, I’m throwing you a bone here. Give us some information on using Cloud Control 13c for Linux patch management and maybe you’ll be able to persuade us to spend some money.” The response was something to the tune of, “Yes. You can do Linux patch management.” What a well thought out response! Amazing!

I’ve held back on writing this post for a few days because the whole process was infuriating and I would have ended up calling those salespeople fuckwits and morons, which would be rather unproductive…

Anyway, as a response to that fiasco I decided to spend the weekend having a play with Spacewalk at home. Not the jazzed up Oracle version, but the open source and, more importantly, free version.

I’m not part of the Sys Admin team at work, but I like to play around with stuff and get an idea of what it brings to the table. I think Spacewalk will fit well into what we already have, and it won’t cost us any money. As a result of playing around with it I’ve decided to use Spacewalk at home to manage all my VMs. 🙂

I’m a fan of Oracle Linux and I’m a fan of Cloud Control. I’m not saying Cloud Control is not capable doing the stuff we need. It might even be better than what we have now. It’s just not an option for anything other than managing our Oracle databases and WebLogic servers at this time.

I’m not a fan of idiot sales people that don’t care to understand what the customer wants and repeatedly spout preplanned sentences that are meant mislead and to scare you into buying something you don’t need.

Cheers

Tim…