Category: Linux

Video : Ansible Playbooks : Introduction

In today’s video we’ll introduce Ansible Playbooks.

There’s quite a lot to cover, so this is only one of several videos covering playbooks. The video is based on the following article.

You might find some useful stuff here.

The star of today’s video is Bailey, who has been known to associate with Connor McDonald at times…

Cheers

Tim…

Video : Ansible : Installation and Configuration

In today’s video we’ll cover the installation and configuration of Ansible.

The video is based on the following article, and will be the first in a series of videos.

You might find some useful stuff here.

The star of today’s video is Neil Chandler, who took time out of his busy bathroom schedule to record this clip.

Cheers

Tim…

Bringing new life to an old MacBook Pro

I’ve got an old MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009) that sits next to my bed. I use it for watching films and streaming rain sounds while I sleep. It stopped getting OS updates a while ago, and more recently it doesn’t want to play Prime videos, so I figured it was time to take action.

It’s got a Core 2 Duo processor, 8G RAM and a 500G SSD, so it’s not great, but it’s more than capable of doing what I need it to do…

I would like to say I did a lot of research to decide the best OS for it, but that would be a lie. I figured I wanted Ubuntu, and I wanted to run a simple window manager, so I picked Ubuntu Mate.

  • I downloaded the ISO to my Windows 11 desktop.
  • Used the Portable Apps version of Rufus to burn it onto a USB stick.
  • Put the USB stick into my old MBP.
  • Restarted the MBP and held down the “alt” key to give me the boot menu, and picked the USB stick.
  • The live version of Ubuntu Mate started and I clicked the install icon.
  • A few questions later and I had a running Ubuntu Mate installation.

The first problem was I didn’t have wifi access, so I had to plug directly into my router to get internet access. I installed a suitable driver for my wifi card, did an update and I was ready to go. If I had read the installer pages properly, I could have loaded the proprietary drivers as part of the install, but randomly clicking the “Continue” button without reading is the way I roll. 🙂

I installed KeePassXC and DropBox to get access to my passwords, and that’s about it. It’s working really well, and saved me having to think about what to replace the old laptop with.

So my current operating system landscape looks like this:

  • My main workstation is a Dell XPS laptop running Windows 11.
  • I also have a MacBook Pro 15-inch on my desk running macOS Big Sur, which I use to stream films while I work, and test my Vagrant builds on macOS.
  • I have a server running Oracle Linux 7, which I tend not to use much these days as my XPS laptop has more than enough power to do most things I want to do in VirtualBox VMs.
  • I have the old MacBook Pro 13-inch next to my bed running Ubuntu Mate.

I believe in operating system diversity… 🙂

I know people become fanboys/fangirls/fanpeople of their operating system of choice, but I really can’t be bothered with all that anymore. I used Red Hat Linux, then Fedora as my main desktop for 10+ years. I spent a few years with macOS as my daily driver. Now I’m happily using Windows. I’m not even that partisan about my Linux distros these days. I use Oracle Linux for all my Oracle software, but I’ll use any Linux distro for non-Oracle stuff. It’s all the same but different… 😉

Cheers

Tim…

Video : Oracle Database 21c Express Edition (XE) Installation

In today’s video we’ll demonstrate how to install Oracle Express Edition 21c on Oracle Linux 8.

The video is based on this article.

Here are some other things you might find useful.

The star of today’s video is Martin Widlake, doing his best Monty Python impression.

Cheers

Tim…

Switching from CentOS 8 to Oracle Linux 8 (OL8)

If you’re a CentOS user, you’ve probably already seen Red Hat are ditching CentOS, and CentOS 8 will be the first casualty. At the time of writing Red Hat haven’t released a clear plan for what CentOS users should do. Neither Fedora or CentOS Stream are viable options for people looking for long term stability. There’s a suggestion that cut price RHEL licenses may be available in future, but all we know at this point is CentOS is on a road to nowhere.

One of the options you might want to consider is switching from CentOS 8 to Oracle Linux 8. Oracle Linux is a binary clone of RHEL, like CentOS. Also like CentOS, you can use Oracle Linux for free (downloads here), and that includes free updates.

But what do you do about your existing CentOS 8 installations? Well that’s really easy too, as you can convert them directly to Oracle Linux. Oracle have an overview of the process here, but it boils down to downloading a script from GitHub and running it. Here are the steps I used to do a conversion.

First, take a backup of the system, so you have a fallback restore point.

We display the contents of the “/etc/centos-release” file, which shows we have a CentOS 8.2 installation.

$ cat /etc/centos-release
CentOS Linux release 8.2.2004 (Core)
$

Download the conversion script from the Oracle GitHub repo, and run it. Then wait while it downloads the packaged as switches you from CentOS to Oracle Linux.

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oracle/centos2ol/main/centos2ol.sh
sudo bash centos2ol.sh

Reboot the system.

sudo reboot

We now have an Oracle Linux server running the UEK kernel.

$ sudo cat /etc/oracle-release
Oracle Linux Server release 8.3
$ uname -r
5.4.17-2036.101.2.el8uek.x86_64
$

If you don’t want to use the UEK kernel, you can switch to the Red Hat Compatibility Kernel really easily. List the current kernels.

$ ls -l /boot/vmlinuz-*
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 8913656 Oct 22 22:59 /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-5fd85e2afa24422eb63894e2dbfa9898
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 8975912 Dec 18 18:07 /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-caad1bd0b25943b1b526a131661074b3
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 8920200 Sep 14 14:45 /boot/vmlinuz-4.18.0-193.19.1.el8_2.x86_64
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 9520664 Dec 16 00:42 /boot/vmlinuz-4.18.0-240.8.1.el8_3.x86_64
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 8975912 Dec 3 02:02 /boot/vmlinuz-5.4.17-2036.101.2.el8uek.x86_64
$

Set the latest Red Hat Compatibility Kernel as the default. It will be the highest version one without “uek” in the name.

$ sudo grubby --set-default /boot/vmlinuz-4.18.0-240.8.1.el8_3.x86_64
The default is /boot/loader/entries/caad1bd0b25943b1b526a131661074b3-4.18.0-240.8.1.el8_3.x86_64.conf with index 3 and kernel /boot/vmlinuz-4.18.0-240.8.1.el8_3.x86_64
$

Reboot the server.

$ sudo reboot

Now we are using the Red Hat Compatibility Kernel rather than UEK.

$ cat /etc/oracle-release
Oracle Linux Server release 8.3
$
$ uname -r
4.18.0-240.8.1.el8_3.x86_64
$

Easy!

At this point we need to do some testing to make sure we are happy with the final result!

This type of switch may not be the preferred solution for every system, but it’s simple and saves you doing a full rebuild to switch to another distribution.

If you’re still not sure about Oracle Linux, here’s a FAQ post I wrote about it.

Cheers

Tim…

Video : Using Podman With Existing Dockerfiles (Oracle Database and ORDS)

Today’s video shows me using some of my existing Docker builds with Podman. Specifically a 19c database container and an Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) container.

For those with an understanding of Docker, it should look really familiar, but it does introduce a twist in the form of a pod.

The video is based on this article.

You can see more information about containers here.

The star of today’s video is Bart Sjerps. It was really hard to find a piece of this recording that didn’t have James Morle wittering over everyone on it. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Video : Install Podman on Oracle Linux 8 (OL8)

In today’s video we’ll take a look at installing Podman on Oracle Linux 8 (OL8).

This is based on the article here.

You can see more information about containers here.

The star of today’s video is John King. John’s been on the channel a couple of times before. Once to do a message to one of his super-fans, a work colleague of mine who was impressed that I know John, and once for a regular “.com” appearance. I blame the wife for the terrible audio. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Database 19c on Fedora 32

Fedora 32 was released at the end of April (see here). Here comes the standard warning.

Here are the usual things I do when a new version of Fedora comes out.

I pushed a Vagrant build to GitHub.

So now you know how to do it, don’t. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Linux 8 (OL8) : Podman

When Oracle Linux 8 (OL8) was released, one of the first things I did was check for the Oracle supplied Docker engine. Nothing.

Not to worry I thought. They are probably waiting for UEK6 to ship before they worry about the Docker engine. I pretty much left it at that. I wasn’t really in much of a rush. To be honest, a new version of Oracle Linux doesn’t really hit my radar until the Oracle database is certified on it. 🙂

UEK6 went live in March and still no sign, so in a recent email exchange with Simon Coter I mentioned it, and was set on the path to Podman.

If I’m honest my first thought was, “Oh FFS! I’ve only just learnt Docker and now I’ve got to start again!” To qualify that, having used Oracle databases for 25 years, using Docker for about 2.5 years feels like I’ve only just started. 🙂

First things first. We currently use Docker in production, so I wanted a route to OL8 without any substantial change, should I need it. So I did this.

It’s not a recommendation. Just something to keep in my back pocket.

After a quick bout of denial I sat down and started to work through some stuff with Podman. Time for a couple of quotes to set some context.

“What is Podman? Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Simply put: `alias docker=podman`.”

https://podman.io/

“The podman, buildah, and skopeo container tools are provided in the Oracle Linux 8 release. These tools are compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and can be used to manage the same Linux containers that are produced and managed by Docker and other compatible container engines. Because these tools are light-weight and primarily focused on a subset of features, you can run them minus the overhead of working with a daemon process.”

Release Notes for Oracle Linux 8

After reading this, I was a little less daunted. I installed Podman on OL8 and started to play. That resulted in these posts.

The later is an example of how I run up my demo Docker system using Podman. It’s made up of a container for Oracle Database 19c, and a separate container running ORDS on Tomcat. You’ll notice I use my Docker builds with no changes. It just shows that from a basic usage perspective Podman=Docker.

A few quick things I noticed immediately when switching to Podman.

  • Networking is a little different. You define a pod to hold containers, and you expose services to the outside world at the Pod level. Containers inside the Pod can speak to each other. For the simple examples I’ve worked with is actually easier than using Docker networks.
  • There is a package called “podman-docker”, which allows you to use the Docker command, even though you are using Podman. I don’t really like this. I think it’s better to just stick to a regular alias if you feel the need to retain the Docker command. Better still, just get used to typing podman instead of docker.
  • There is no native equivalent of docker-compose. There is a podman-compose project you might want to try. Of course the name “Podman” gives you a clue about what you should really be doing. Defining pods. In addition to manually defining pods, they can get run from a YAML file that’s compatible with Kubernetes. You can generate these YAML files from an existing pod. I’ve not written up this aspect yet, but it’s coming. 🙂

So far it’s been a pretty simple journey, but remember I’m a noob. The articles and my opinions on this will evolve over time.

A quick mention about Vagrant. When I am playing with Docker and Podman I use Vagrant to build a play VM. As a result of this stuff I’ve changed things around a little. If you look at my Vagrant respository you will see the old docker directory has gone and now we have these.

I’ve now pretty much ditched my OL7 Docker environment in favour of the OL8 Podman environment. The only way I’m really going to learn it is by forcing myself to use it. 🙂

If anyone else is in the denial phase, I understand where you are at. Just get started. It’s not so bad. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’ve not played with Buildah and Skopeo yet.

PPS. The image has no significance. It just looks good. 🙂

Video : Kata Containers : Running Containers Inside Lightweight Virtual Machines on Oracle Linux 7 (OL7)

Today’s video demonstrates how to configure Kata Containers on Oracle Linux 7 (OL7), allowing you to run containers inside lightweight virtual machines (VMs).

This video is is based on an article of the same name, but relates to a bunch of other articles and videos on the subject of containers.

The star of today’s video is Jake Kuramoto, originally of The AppsLab fame, and now at WorkDay.

Cheers

Tim…