Category: Linux

PXE Network Installations…

I’ve been using Kickstart and network installations for a while now. I think the last time I wrote about it was in RHEL3 days (here).

Well I finally got round to having a look at PXE Network Installations, which just tags an extra bit onto the start to save you running round with boot CDs.

With the amount of installations I’ve been doing recently it’s really handy.

Cheers

Tim…

DNS Configuration for SCAN and Editions…

A couple of new articles have crept out recently. The first is me pretending to understand DNS.

I used this configuration in place of the “/etc/hosts” in my VMware RAC installation and it worked great.

The second is a brief romp through edition-based redefinition.

This article started to get really big and feel like a rewrite of the manual, so I stripped most of it out and really just left a couple of examples of how it can be used. I figure this is enough to give you a feel for what it can do, but isn’t as daunting as working through the manuals if all you want is a quick taste.

I’ve seen edition-based redefinition described as a killer feature, but I’m not so sure myself. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is really cool, but “really cool” doesn’t always become “frequently used”. As I was playing with it I had flashbacks to Workspace Management introduced in 9i. I’ve spoken to a lot of poeple over the years and very few even remember it exists, let alone use it.

There is nothing conceptually difficult about edition-based redefintion, but there are potentially a lot of working parts involved and therefore a lot of scope for human error and/or confusion. I’m sure some people have been praying for something like this for a long time, and others will remain blissfully ignorant of it forever. It would be interesting to gaze into a crystal ball and see how much this stuff is used in a few years time (and get some lottery results).

Cheers

Tim…

Google Chrome… Not for enterprise… (LSB 3.2 restriction)

Having seen the fuss over Google Chrome for Linux I decided to jump on the bandwagon and download it.

When I tried to install it I was met with this message:

# rpm -i google-chrome-beta_current_x86_64.rpm
warning: google-chrome-beta_current_x86_64.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 7fac5991
error: Failed dependencies:
lsb >= 3.2 is needed by google-chrome-beta-4.0.249.30-33928.x86_64
#

This restriction to LSB (Linux Standard Base) 3.2 presents a bit of a problem for any people running RHEL clones as the latest updates are actually LSB 3.1 (redhat-lsb-3.1-12.3.EL.el5.centos.x86_64).

I suppose that’s one point for the people running desktop Linux distros. I guess I will have to wait for RHEL6. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle 11gR2 on Fedora 12…

I had a play around yesterday and installed Oracle 11gR2 on Fedora 12:

I think this might be the last time I install Oracle on Fedora. Why? For two reasons:

  1. When I first started doing installs on Red Hat 7 (pre Enterprise Linux) it was the only sensible choice. After the introduction of Enterprise Linux there were no free alternatives, so installing on Red Hat Linux, then Fedora Core and now Fedora seemed a viable alternative to paying for an Enterprise Linux distribution. Fast forward a few years and we have Oracle Enterprise Linux which is a supported binary clone of RHEL and most importantly it’s free, so that seems like the logical choice for testing installations.
  2. When I started doing these installations I had to swap hard drives, so having an installation that ran on my Linux desktop was import to me. Once again, fast forward a few years and I never run Oracle directly on my desktop or laptop OS. I always use a Virtual Machine and install Oracle on Oracle Enterprise Linux. Since there are a number of free virtualization products available, there really is no barrier to entry here also.

So why did I bother with this installation? It seems that Fedora12 will likely be the base which RHEL6 is built on, so it is mildly more interesting to me that previous Fedora releases.

Anyway, the articles are there, but do I care about them? No. I’ve always said I write about what interests me and Fedora (or any other Distro for that matter) are completely irrelevant to me now. I see no point in installing Oracle on anything other than RHEL, and really by that I mean Oracle Enterprise Linux, so that is likely to be what I do from now on. Of course, you should never say never. 🙂

For those people banging their heads against a brick wall trying to install Oracle on unsupported distributions, I say download a free virtualization product (VMware Server or VirtualBox) and use it to install Oracle Enterprise Linux and use that for all your future Oracle installs. It’s free and easy.

Cheers

Tim…

You know you’re an Oracle geek when…

You know you’re a geek when…

Faced with the choice between drinking, dancing and eating at the OTN Night party or attending the OTN Installfest, you go to the OTN Installfest…

Without making myself sound even sadder than I am, this years Installfest had some quite exciting stuff in it.

Btrfs – You love Linux, but you wish it had an enterprise class filesystem. There’s one coming thanks to Oracle…

JRocket Virtual Edition – You want to provision a new App Server on Oracle VM. So you have to install and patch an OS and then install the app server right? Wrong! You use JRocket Virtual Edition which installs directly on Oracle VM. No OS, nothing!

Assembly Builder – You need to provision a new multi-server system on Oracle VM. Maybe 2 DNS servers, identity manager server, a 2 node RAC database and a couple of app servers. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could drag and drop a few boxes onto a screen, draw lines between them and fill in a couple of properties then hit go! I’ve seen a demo of just that. It takes OEL JeOS and Oracle VM Template Builder to the next level.

Wim Coekaerts and his team are stars.

Fun, fun, fun…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Oh yeah. Oracle Validated will soon be updated to work with 11g R2.

Oracle 11gR2 RAC On Linux Using VMware Server 2

I’ve taken my first tentative steps into 11gR2 RAC and it was a big surprise.

11gR2 RAC feels very different to 11gR1 RAC. I can imagine quite a few people wanting to upgrade from 11gR1 thinking it will be trivial and getting a rude awakening…

The Grid Infrastructure (Clusterware + ASM) seems more complicated. There are more installation options, more prerequisites, more background processes and a bigger memory requirement…

I typically install 11gR1 RAC on VMware using 1G of RAM per VM. If you try that with 11gR2 you will get to the end of the Grid Infrastructure installation and have nothing left. The minimum recommendation for Grid Infrastructure alone is 1.5G, but if you want the RAC DB as well you are talking 2.5G. It actually worked fine with 2G of RAM allocated to each VM, but this is a whopping increase compared to 11gR1.

At this point I feel like I know nothing about 11gR2 RAC, but it certainly doesn’t feel like a patched version of 11gR1. If this had been released as 12g I would have still have been surprised by the level of change.

So over the next few days I’m expecting the dust to settle, my residual fear of all things new to subside and I’ll probably change my opinion completely and think it’s all the same as it was before… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Please don’t try this installation on your 32-bit Windows laptop with 2G of RAM then write to me complaining it doesn’t work and telling me the article is rubbish… 🙂

Fedora 11 and Oracle 11g…

It’s that time again where I check to see if Oracle installs on the latest version of Fedora. The result once again is yes, it does. The main website has the links to the articles. I would add links here only the browser on this internet cafe machine doesn’t support cut & pates. 🙂

When I get on a real computer I’ll put the links in this post as well. 🙂

This release of Fedora is probably quite significant as it is likely to be the base for RHEL6.

Cheers

Tim…