My Sister’s Funeral…

Yesterday was my sister’s funeral. The easter holidays and the imminent royal wedding caused some serious delays, so rather than having the funeral within about a week of her death, it ended up being just short of three weeks. Far too long, but it was out of our control so you’ve just got to get on with it.

I was pretty nervous during the day. I had organized most of the stuff and I was just waiting for something to go spectacularly wrong. Fortunately it all went to plan, which was a relief. We are not what I would consider a religious family and I find it more than a little hypocritical that, like many Brits, we roll out religion for births, marriages and deaths, but it seems to be what people want at these times and who am I to argue? We ended up having a Church of England service at a crematorium. The Reverend was a really cool guy (he has a WordsPress blog 🙂 ) and did a cracking job. Everyone was really pleased with the way it went.

After the service we had a wake at a pub close to my sister’s house. My family’s response to most things is to talk crap and laugh at ourselves. Not surprisingly, we reverted to type pretty quickly, which was good to see. It turns out my cousin might be going to work at the funeral directors we used, which prompted comments like, “If you had got your arse in gear we could have got a discount on the funeral!” etc. Like I said, we talk crap and laugh at ourselves…

… and so ends another chapter…

Nearly forgot. We asked people to donate money to Cancer Research UK, rather than buy flowers. That went really well.

Cheers

Tim…

No Linux servers for Oracle Support…

I was just mailed a bug update and it included this text (spelling mistakes theirs, not mine).

Note customer is on Linux but could not find an available
11.2 Linux database to test on.  Reprocided problem on Solaris
confirming that there is some generic problem here.

Really?

And here’s me thinking that firing up a VM with any version of Linux & Oracle was quick and easy. Perhaps their VMs are running on Amazon, hence the lack of available systems. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Fast & Furious 5: Rio Heist…

It was only as I started to write this post about Fast & Furious 5: Rio Heist that I realised I’ve not seen the 4th film yet. I’m sure it’s not much different to all the others. This one has most of the old gang back together to drive around really fast and do lots of impossible stuff. It’s a nice bit of mindless escapism, just before getting back into my diesel Renault Clio to drive home at a sedate pace… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Perhaps I’m not making myself clear… Virtual Insanity…

What is it with virtualization? It’s like people remove their brain as soon as they hear the word. I get a lot of questions about virtual RAC installations and the vast majority of problems are due to people trying to run them on a host that can’t cut it.

  • When I explain you need 3-4G RAM for each VM node in a VirtualBox RAC installation, would you consider it sensible to try and build a 3 node virtual RAC on a host with 8G RAM? Do the maths. If you are attempting a virtual 11.2 installation with less than 3G RAM per node and you have problems, don’t come asking me because I will be out.
  • Do you really expect disk speed to be good when you put 8 virtual disks on to the system disk on the host machine? Do you think virtual disks magically run independently of the hosts disk subsystem? Putting all the virtual disks on one physical disk will work, but it will be so darn slow you will probably be leaving installations running overnight. Believe me, I’ve done it. If you want any sort of speed, spread the virtual disks around on separate physical disks.
  • Yes, you really are going to need all those IP addresses. Deal with it.
  • Use DNS or accept the fact there will be SCAN configuration errors during the installation. It’s one or the other baby!
  • Have you really done what my article suggests? Normally, after about a week of going back and forward I get a message saying something like, “Oh I fixed it. I didn’t bother doing step X before and once I did it it worked fine.” Don’t waste my time and yours. Follow the steps, or do it your own way and don’t blame me if it doesn’t work.
  • Use the same software I list in the installation. Don’t just assume that if it works fine with OL 5.x it’s going to work unchanged on OL6, SUSE x.x or Ubuntu (Lethargic Leaper) etc. If you want to try with different distributions that’s fine, but I’m probably not going to be able to help you because if there isn’t an installation guide for it on my site, it probably means I’ve not done it.
  • If it is the first Oracle installation you’ve ever done, don’t start by trying to install a virtual RAC. Learn to walk before you try running…

Cheers

Tim…

Two New Articles: UDEV and Database Triggers…

I’ve recently put a couple of new articles about old subjects on the website. In both cases, the articles were initiated by forum questions, but the explanations became too painful in the format of a forum post so they graduated into articles…

  • UDEV SCSI Rules Configuration In Oracle Linux 5 : For those of you that like to follow my Virtual RAC guides, but don’t like using ASMLib, you can use this article and replace ASMLib with UDEV.
  • Database Triggers Overview : This is really a primer on database triggers. I’ve focussed mostly on simple DML triggers, since this is what the vast majority of trigger-related questions I’m asked relate to. Consider it the “minimum” you should know before you write a database trigger.

Cheers

Tim…

Julie Marie (Hall) Lloyd : 1962-2011

While I was at OOW2010 my sister Julie was diagnosed with skin cancer. Just after I got back to the UK some scans revealed it had spread to a number of places including her brain and stomach. She started a course of treatment and we were all hopeful, but we knew the odds were stacked against her. On Saturday 9th April she died at the age of 48.

When Julie was 11 a boy at school was annoying her. She took a swing at him, missed and punched the guy standing next to him. The guy she accidentally punched was called Mark. He became her boyfriend, then later her husband and now, after 37 years of being together, her widower.

Cheers

Tim…

SCAN Computers Customer Service…

I mentioned in a previous post that I was planning another customer services rant and here it comes.

A few weeks ago I decided to buy a new server from SCAN Computers. Let me start by saying I’ve used SCAN lots of times in the past for components and they’ve always been great. That’s one of the reasons I decided to use them for a pre-built system. I picked the relevant configuration (2x Xeon quad, 24G RAM, 6 Hard drives etc.) and paid my cash. What followed left me with a rather bad taste in my mouth…

  • When I ordered the kit I was given an estimated delivery date of 2 days. I realized this was a rubbish automated message, but I later received a mail to say they were busy and couldn’t start the build for another week.
  • After some more time, I was contacted and told they couldn’t start the build for a little longer because they were waiting for Intel to deliver the server motherboard and chassis.
  • Once the build started I received an email as it passed each checkpoint. Once the build was complete it went into QA, then I received no more notifications.
  • After 7 days I got pissed off and phoned them to ask what was going on. I was then told the build had failed QA and they were trying to rectify the issue in conjunction with Intel.
  • After a few more days I was contacted and told they couldn’t get all the hard drives I ordered. I agreed to have it delivered with just 5 hard drives, rather than wait an unspecified time for the missing disk to arrive.
  • The refund for the missing hard drive has still not arrived at my bank.
  • The next email I got was telling me the server had failed to be delivered because they couldn’t get hold of me. Admittedly, my account had an incorrect mobile number on it, but the land line number was correct. I received no calls on the land line on the days when they allegedly tried to call. They also didn’t attempt the delivery without contact, even though the address on my account was correct and I was in on the day in question.
  • The delivery was finally made 5 days after the first “failed” delivery.
  • I opened the box and found there was no DVD drive installed. I phoned SCAN to ask what was going on. It seems the option “Use DVD Writer included in chassis”, actually means, “No DVD Writer installed”. I kicked up a fuss about this and was sent a DVD drive for free, which I had to install myself. The DVD drive came the next day, along with a data cable, but there was no converter cable for the power, so I had to go out an buy one.
  • The lack of a DVD drive didn’t stop me starting to use the server. I just did a network installation of Fedora 14. In doing so, I noticed the RAID configuration was incorrect. I asked for a RAID 1 system disk and all the other disks just to be left alone. Instead the additional disks were in a RAID 0 set. It took me quite a while and a couple of phone calls to realize that in order to access the RAID configuration, the BIOS had to be switched out of silent boot.

So it’s just short of 2 months down the line, lots of phone calls and a refund for a missing disk still outstanding…

I would like to mention the server itself is awesome and the individuals I dealt with in customer service were nice enough, but the whole process has aged me. When you are sitting in the SCAN phone queue the hold music tells you that you’re a valued customer and SCAN are transparent and aim to provided the best customer experience possible. I think not…

Would I recommend them? From a kit perspective they are cool. You can choose the components you want (within reason) and it has been put together and cabled well. Unfortunately, the kit is only part of the issue. The whole experience has been really poor…

Cheers

Tim…