Fedora 21 : Upgrading from Fedora 20

I just did an upgrade of my old desktop from Fedora 20 to Fedora 21. The process was similar to this old blog post, but there were some variations, so I’ll list the procedure here.

  • Update your current Fedora 20 system by issuing the “yum update -y” command and restart once it is complete.
  • Install the latest “fedup” package using “sudo yum –enablerepo=updates-testing install fedup”
  • Run the “sudo fedup-cli –network 21 –product=nonproduct” command.
  • If you are using Dropbox, disable the repository using the “yum-config-manager –disable Dropbox” command. Re-enable it once the Fedora 21 repository is available.
  • Run the following clean up commands.
    sudo rpm --rebuilddb
    sudo yum distro-sync --setopt=deltarpm=0
    
    sudo yum install rpmconf
    sudo rpmconf -a
  • If you are using Chrome, uninstall and reinstall Chrome.

It seemed to go fine!

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12cR4 Production Upgrade

I’ve already written about the 12cR3 to 12cR4 upgrade here. I did a few run through’s at home to practice it and it all seemed good.

Setting The Scene

Just to set the scene, for our production environment we run Cloud Control in a VMware virtual machine, using Oracle Linux 6.5 as the guest OS. With that setup, we can use a simple installation (DB and OMS on the same VM) and use VMware to provide our failover, rather than having to worry about multiple OMS installations and any DB failover technology etc. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Cloud Control, it’s Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS)! As far as our managed servers go, most of our databases and all our middle tier stuff runs on VMware and Oracle Linux too. We have a handful of things still hanging around on HP-UX and Solaris, which will hopefully be migrated soon…

Upgrade Attempt 1 : Non-Starter

Yesterday I started the upgrade of our production system. Pretty much straight out of the blocks I hit a road block. It didn’t like the agents running on our HP-UX servers. The upgrades of the HP-UX agents are so painful. Every time so far I’ve had to reinstall them. As a result, I didn’t bother to upgrade them last time and kept running with the previous version of the agents. The upgrade wouldn’t have anything to do with that, so I forgot about the Cloud Control upgrade and I spent yesterday attempting to upgrade the HP-UX agents to 12cR3, before I could attempt the 12cR4 Cloud Control upgrade.

As usual, the upgrade of the agents on HP-UX involved me uninstalling, removing all the targets, installing, discovering all the targets and setting up the backups etc. Not all of it is scripted yet, so it is an annoying and painful process. I’m not sure if other HP-UX users suffer this, but it seems pretty consistently bad for us. The sooner we get rid of these straggling HP-UX servers the better!

So this wasn’t so much a failure of the upgrade. It was really down to me being lazy and not bothering to upgrade some agents.

Fast forward to this morning and I was actually ready to start the upgrade. 🙂

Upgrade Attempt 2 : Success

With the 12cR3 agents in place on HP-UX, the upgrade ran past that step with no problems and on to the main body of the installation. The install and upgrade were textbook.

I’ve upgraded the agent on the cloud control server, but I’m not going to upgrade any of the other agents until I know things are working fine.

Happy days!

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 20 : Upgrade from Fedora 19

It’s a little over a month since Fedora 20 was released, but during a terrible bout of insomnia last night I decided to upgrade my desktop PC.

The upgrades using “fedup” worked fine for the previous releases (Fedora 18, Fedora 19). Unfortunately, it failed abysmally for the upgrade to Fedora 20. I tried a few times, but I was not able to troubleshoot it, so I gave up and did a reinstall.

I’ve got an SSD for the system drive, but keep almost everything of importance on a second drive (and a backup drive). I tend to do most things in VMs, so I ended up doing the following:

  • Backup.
  • Copy a few config files to the second drive (smb.conf, hosts, fstab etc).
  • Clean installation on the SSD, not touching the second drive.
  • Put the mount information back into the “/etc/fstab” and mount the second drive.
  • Put the “/etc/hosts” file back in place and install dnsmasq.
  • Put the “smb.conf” file back in place and start samba.
  • Do a “yum update -y” and reboot.
  • Install some utilities, like UltraEdit, VirtualBox, DropBox and Chrome etc.
  • Open up the existing VMs on the second drive using the newly installed VirtualBox.
  • Backup.

That was pretty much it really. I’m, back up and running with a clean OS installation and I guess it took less than an hour from start to finish. I think in future I’ll avoid upgrades. There’s something nice about a sparkly new installation, without any of the old crap left hanging around.

During the installation, I picked MATE as my desktop. I’ve tried the others and this is the one that feels the most natural to me.

Cheers

Tim…

Captain Support and the Windows 8.1 Upgrades

Being the adventurous type of guy he is, Captain Support decided to launch into Windows 8.1 upgrades on his Mom’s and sister-in-law’s laptops. They were identical machines, both running Windows 8 and configured the same. One was local and the other connected to over LogMeIn…

The first thing he noticed about the upgrade is the size of it, approximately 3G. The download and initial install can be done while you’re still using the machine, then comes the inevitable reboot where the real work is done…

The second standout point was the update forced him to him to switch from a local user to a Microsoft Live login. Both Captain Support’s Mom and sister-in-law both use Hotmail/Outlook.com, so this did not present an immediate issue, but it was annoying. Perhaps there is a way to avoid this, but it was not immediately appareent to Captain Support… You can still create local users after the update of course…

The third annoyance was that of the two machines, one upgraded fine and kept all it’s customizations. The other upgraded OK, but seemed to lose some of it’s customizations, including Classic Shell. He was not sure if this related to the LogMeIn access or not. Fortunately, there was not much repair needed.

So after a bit of messing about, Captain Support had two Windows 8.1 laptops, that looked and felt just like Windows 8.0. 🙂

Whilst using the beta version of Windows 8.1, Captain Support noticed that his Citrix login for work was broken. Once the laptop upgrades were complete Captain Support noticed a problem at work and tried out the Citrix client on the production version of Windows 8.1 and it worked fine, so he was able to log in and save the day, or at least the backups of a dev system…

In the airport today I noticed that IE 11 on Windows 8.1 is reported to break some websites, including a number of Google services. Good job nobody uses IE these days. When I get a chance to contact Captain Support I will tell him what I read, in case the has to fly in and rescue his Mom and sister-in-law…

If any drama ensues I’m sure Captain Support will tell me about it, so I can pass it on…

Cheers

Captain Support (reported by Tim…)

PS. I wish I could fly like Captain Support. Aeroplane travel sucks…

Fedora 19 : Upgrade from Fedora 18…

I finally got round to upgrading my desktop machine to Fedora 19. The experience was pretty similar to upgrade from Fedora 17 to Fedora 18.

This time I had to remove FireFox, as it was holding on to Fedora 18 packages. Once I removed and re-added it I could complete a “yum update”. Things seem to be OK.

The DropBox repository is lagging behind again…

I still think it’s better to do clean installations, but I don’t have time to do that now. Perhaps when I get back from South America I’ll do it properly.

Cheers

Tim…

 

 

Upgrading to Oracle Database 12c : First Steps…

I’ve taken my first tentative steps into upgrading to Oracle 12c.

This article is targeted at the type of information you are likely to need for the 12c OCP DBA exam. In reality, upgrades are too important to rely on a generic article like this. Every time I do a real upgrade I go back to the upgrade docs and work my way through them. That’s the only way to make sure you’ve not missed out an important step, specific to the features you are using.

My first impressions are:

  • The DBUA looks a little different, but not enough to scare you.
  • The manual upgrades are very different and will take a bit of getting used to.
  • I think the transport database option is quite interesting, restrictions permitting.

I don’t know how long it will be before I have to do a “real” upgrade to 12c. It probably won’t happen until 12cR2…

I’ve recently installed a clean 12c instance at work to hold a FMW repository, but that is for a throwaway test VM. If it were a real installation we would no doubt be using 11gR2.

Cheers

Tim…

MobaXterm 6.3…

Thanks to Norman Dunbar for pointing out that MobaXterm 6.3 has been released. You can find the download and changelog in the usual place.

I’ll be interested to see how the performance improvements to SFTP work out. I’ve seen some issues with this during transfers of large files before. The built in NFS and VNC servers sound interesting too. I can think of one situation where the NFS server would come in really handy. 🙂

Great stuff!

Cheers

Tim…