Just like buses…

Earlier in the week I wrote about receiving an ADSL modem three months after I switched ISPs (how long?). Well, today I received another one, hence the title of this post. You wait for ages, then two come along 🙂

So now I have a wireless ADSL router and three speedtouch ADSL modems. I was considering selling the modems on ebay, but looking at the price they go for, it hardly seems worth the effort…

Cheers

Tim…

Pet Medications…

My website has recently come under fire from link spammers in the comments associated with my articles. It seems my site is a good place to advertise pet medications…

I suppose I should be flattered 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I tried to post this yesterday, but blogger seemed incapable of publishing a post. Weird 🙂

FC5 Update… Again…

Over the last few weeks I’ve received lots of comments relating to the Oracle 10gR2 on FC5 issue. Recently, most of these have been people commenting on the success of the installation. As a result, I revisited the article based on all the comments and made the following changes:

  • There was a typo on my amendment on the gennttab script. It’s now corrected.
  • I originally used the source rather than the binary of the openmotif21 package. I now use the binary.
  • I was originally installing from an early download of 10gR2, the one that extracts to give a “./db/Disk1/runInstaller” structure. I downloaded a later release that extracts to “./database/runInstaller”. I now use this later release.

I ran through the installation again this morning and it worked perfectly. I don’t know which of the three changes made the difference and to be totally frank, I don’t care. So as it stands, the installation works fine and I hope this is the last time I’ll have to use FC5.

Thanks to everyone who helped in the production of the final article. All your comments were appreciated. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. The document has been released, so it is now listed as a new article. You gotta laugh 🙂

10g RAC on Linux…

I spent the Bank Holiday weekend playing with 10g RAC on Linux. I don’t have a FireWire disk, and I didn’t want to destroy my NAS, so I decided to user VMware Server to fake it. That process resulted in this:

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2.0.1) RAC Installation On CentOS 4 Using VMware Server

It’s got about 100 screen shots, so it’s a bit on the large side 🙂

I’ve been using RAC (9i and 10g) on Tru64 for a few years, but until this weekend I had never installed it on any other operating system. Suffice to say, the process is almost identical.

I suppose I should repeat the exercise on Windows 2003, but I’m not sure I can be bothered. Windows is such a drag 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle ACE…

A week last Saturday I checked my email and found an invitation to the Oracle ACE program. I was extremely flattered and instantly accepted. I spent the next few minutes preening myself whilst reading the news on Slashdot and The Register. Then I noticed that China had bought Google, Slashdot had gone pink and Tom Kyte had joined Microsoft. I checked the date and sure enough, it was the 1st of April (April fools day).

Needless to say I felt like a total jerk and responded to the mail with a, “Very funny. How vain am I to fall for that?” type response.

The funny thing is, it was actually real. You can see my ugly mug here.

I also noticed that Jeff Hunter now an Oracle ACE. Well done mate!

Of course, the pressure is on bigtime. Got to live up to this “ACE-dom” thing. I’m off to save the world!

Cheers

Tim…

Disaster Recovery Testing Update…

That’s the second week of disaster recovery testing over. It went a lot better this time. We can definitely recreate out production RAC, cold-failover clustered infrastructure and our application server layer, which is a massive relief.

There have been lots of lessons learnt, and lots of new documents generated. I’m hoping the next test in a few weeks will be a walk in the park 🙂

You get so complacent about your documentation until someone else has to follow it. As part of the “What happens if I get hit by a bus?” paranoia that these tests produce, I’ve started capturing screen shots of all the Linux OS installations. I did a load at the weekend that will be used to create a “fool-proof” idiots installation guide for work, but I also captured some images with less sensitive information to produce some pages for my website. They’ll just be pages full of images, like the Solaris install article, but they might come in handy if people are unfamiliar with the OS installation process. I’ll write a post when they are done…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. All weekend PC support duties were completed. My Dad now has ADSL and some AntiVirus software. The world can sleep safe tonight! 🙂