Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

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! 🙂

PC support tips…

1) When your dad rings up asking for help with his computer, ask the following questions:

  • Do you know what [a browser | Internet Explorer] is?
  • Do you know what the “Start” button is?

If the answer to either of these questions is “NO!”, make plans to visit him on Sunday, rather than starting World War III trying to talk him through his ADSL setup!

2) Every time you visit anyone, regardless of who they are, sneak into their study and make sure their AntiVirus software is up to date. A stitch in time saves nine!

2.5) Don’t believe people when they say, “I’ve got a Norton AntiVirus subscription!” They invariably mean they run the version of Norton that was bundled on their machine and they’ve never renewed the subscription. Simply uninstall it and install AVG, then sit back and watch them marvel at how many infected files they have, and how quickly their machine runs without Norton sapping all it’s strength…
Cheers

Tim…

PS. The free edition of AVG is available for Linux. It seems pretty reasonable…

Could you reinstall your Oracle software without a problem?

Here’s a not-so hypothetical situation:

You install your 10g RAC on Tru64 and dutifully write down exactly what you did. Once it’s working you feel happy you could repeat the process. Indeed, you have to when you install your test and production environments. Everything works and your documentation looks good.

Fast forward to a disaster recovery test and your installation procedures don’t work anymore!

Question:
The same kit is working in production, so what’s the difference?

Answer:
The software was installed on the production system, but the kit was later upgraded (more CPUs and memory) to it’s current configuration.

When attempting a fresh install on the revised configuration Oracle seemingly uses a different bunch of flags during the linking phase, which doesn’t affect the software installation, but results in “ORA-12547: TNS:lost contact” when the DBCA attempts to connect to an instance. This is repeatable from SQL*Plus.

A quick relink using the following commands and everyone is happy.

cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib
make -f ins_rdbms.mk numa_off
make -f ins_rdbms.mk ioracle

So, back to the question that is the title of this post.

Question: Could you reinstall your Oracle software without a problem?
Answer: If you’ve dabbled with the hardware, maybe not 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

“DROP object IF EXISTS” in Oracle?

When you run installations and patches you often have log files full of error messages that can be ignored, such as dropping objects that don’t exist prior to creating them, or in some cases creating objects that already exist. As a result, trying to identify “real” errors is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

It would be nice if these meaningless errors could be supressed. I guess it would be a little like the IGNORE=Y option in the import utility.

Of course, there is a judgement call about what constitutes a real error. In some cases, an object not being present when you try to drop it signifies something is very wrong, but for many scripts it’s no big deal.

If Oracle included a “DROP object IF EXISTS” syntax like mySQL, and maybe even a “CREATE object IF MISSING” syntax, it would be a real bonus.

I feel an enhancement request coming on 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: The enhancement request has now been logged on Metalink (ER# 5151826) 🙂