Kickstart and Holiday…

The disaster recovery week showed me how truely boring it is to install lots of Linux boxes in one go. As a result I’ve spent a little time looking at automated installations using Kickstart over the last few days. It’s pretty simple, and makes multiple installations a real no-brainer. I’m sure the next disaster recovery tests will be a little less time consuming because of this. I must download the DVDs so that I don’t even have to change CDs 🙂

I’m off on holiday for a week. Most of the time I’ll be in Edinburgh (Scotland) on a Yoga course, but I will be around from time to time. If I’m not back in a week it means I’m tied in a knot somewhere 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Back to normal life, for a few days…

I’m back in the office today, recovering from the disaster recovery week 🙂

One of my friends phoned today and asked me to cover his yoga classes tonight, so I’ll have to give Karate a miss. Shame, but a friend in need etc.

I hope he feels better by the weekend. We’re both going to a Yoga course in Edinburgh on Friday and I don’t want him sneezing on me during the flight 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Disaster Recovery Testing Update…

So far it’s been a very long and very tiring week. Lots of standing up in very cold server rooms.

The disaster recovery testing has highlighted quite a few interesting points about our kit and our backup and recovery approach. I think this session will stand us in good stead for the second round of testing in a few weeks. By then I’m sure we will have ironed out some of the creases 🙂

One more day to go, then home…

Cheers

Tim…

Disaster Recovery Testing and stuff…

I’m off to HP for the rest of the week to help test our disaster recovery strategy, so I guess things will be a little quiet here for a few days.

OEM Grid Control Update:
So far things look pretty good. The agents still use a stack of memory, just under 1 Gig resident for the Grid Agent and IAS Console together on a Release 1 AS 10g server. Personally I think this is more than a little excessive, but the CPU load isn’t too bad at all, not like the previous version…

I knocked up a quick example of DBMS_PIPE in answer to a question on my forum. Personally, I use AQ for all my messaging these days, but each to their own 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

DBMS_ASSERT and stuff…

I saw a post about the DBMS_ASSERT package on Pete Finnigan’s Oracle security weblog and I couldn’t find any documentation about it, so I thought I’d have a little play and write something about it:

DBMS_ASSERT – Sanitize User Input to Help Prevent SQL Injection

I’m not sure I’ll find a use for it, but it’s always good to know what new bits have been added 🙂

This made me laugh: Counterfeiters send jammed printer for repair

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle 10g Release 2 Grid Control Installation On Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS…

I’ve been having a play with the latest version of the Grid Control:

Oracle 10g Release 2 Grid Control Installation On Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS

It installed no problem and appears to be working right out of the box.

The big question is, does it soak up all the CPU and memory on my servers?

The first version of the Grid Control was a complete nightmare for me. The agents worked fine on the database nodes, but they gobbled up loads of memory and CPU on the application servers, making them unusable. I raised a TAR and was told it was a bug that was fixed in the next release.

I’ve only installed an agent on one development application server at the moment. I’ll add a few more to non-critical servers tomorrow and see how it gets on. Fingers crossed! I’ll post the outcome of this test in a few days.

Cheers

Tim…

Setting the record straight…

In my previous post (Support goes on, and on, and on…) I mentioned that the latest version of the patch in question was issued with some missing directories. Infact, this was incorrect.

I don’t know how, but I was able to see the new directory structure with the old readme file. I can only assume they my text editor, which has remote editing via FTP, was having a bad day. I hear a chorus of, “You should have used vi!”, coming.

Anyway, the latest version of the patch applied successfully to both the development and test environments, so I’m going to schedule it for production some time soon.

My sentiments over the last post remain unchanged, but certainly the last incident was in no way the fault of Oracle Support. I thought it was only fair to set the record straight!

Cheers

Tim…