11gR2 RAC on Windows 2008 using VirtualBox…

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve kinda ignored the fact that any operating system other than Linux (specifically Oracle Linux) exists. It’s quite easy to do when you are working with Oracle products and you get to choose your own environment. 🙂

As a vague nod to the fact that Windows does actually exist, I’ve finally got round to updating my Windows virtual RAC article.

Windows 2008 is an unusual operating system in some respects. The RAC installation is pretty simple really, but finding some of the config dialogs is a complete nightmare. Chains of menus, dialogs, buttons and hyperlinks to get you to the dialog you need. What’s worse, some of the menus are hidden unless you remember to “Alt” or “Alt+N”. Crazy! If I was using Windows on a regular basis I think I would just memorize all the dialog program names and start them directly from the Run menu. It’s got to be easier than traversing that nightmare. I remember when Windows was considered the easy option. It doesn’t feel like the case anymore. 🙂

In related news, yesterday I got an invite from Jeremy Schneider to help out at RAC Attack at OOW 2011. That should be fun. See you there! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Captain Support and the Laptop of Doom…

Friends of Captain Support’s nephews were having a problem with their laptop. They were unable to use a browser to access the internet. This was a job for Captain Support…

A quick twiddle on the machine revealed that FireFox just had proxy settings messed up, but IE was totally screwed. Captain Support suspected someone had tried and failed to install IE8 and the failure had left it in a dodgy state. After much messing around Captain Support came to the conclusion that they should either forget about IE, or reinstall the whole thing. They chose the reinstall option…

All went well until the last few Windows updates were being loaded. Captain Support shouted to number 1 nephew, “Is something burning in the Kitchen?” Whilst waiting for the reply he leaned forward and sniffed the laptop, which was giving off a heavy scent of “dusty Scalextric“. Next the screen started to go black from the bottom-right corner and the smell became stronger. With a slight air of panic, the laptop was switched off very quickly. Captain Support suggested the laptop should either be sent to the manufacture for repair, or binned…

Thus ends the tale of Captain Support and the Laptop of Doom…

Cheers

Captain Support…

Troll Hunter…

Troll Hunter seems to have had mixed reviews ranging from “the best film ever” to “what a load of crap”. I’m somewhere between the two.

It’s filmed in a documentary style using a handheld camera. Think The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. You see a few different types of trolls, with the effects ranging from “give me a break” to quite neat, assuming of course that they are not real. 🙂 The vast majority of the film is in Norwegian, so you need your reading glasses for the subtitles.

I thought it was pretty cool, but I would struggle to recommend it as there are a number of sections of the film that are a little slow and the whole, “this is real footage that’s not been doctored”, approach is a little tired now.

This is the second Norwegian film I’ve seen recently. Norwegian Ninja was hilarious, but I didn’t blog about it because I saw it just after the Norway shootings and it seemed in bad taste. You’ll understand why if you see it. I watched it at a friends house and we were both screaming with laughter. It’s so wrong it’s right… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Mike Carey: The Devil You Know…

I’ve just finished reading “The Devil You Know”, by Mike Carey. It’s the first in a series of books about an exorcist called Felix Castor, who lives and works in London. It’s not all spinning heads and green vomit. Like The Dresden Files, it’s more of a detective story that includes supernatural stuff.

If, like me, you are a fan of Harry Dresden and can’t wait for the next book, then this might quell your appetite.

Cheers

Tim…

Dual Boot: Near Disaster…

Today has been a little emotional…

I decided I wanted to dual boot a server with Fedora 15 and Oracle VM 3.0.1. The machine already had Fedora 15 on, so I moved some stuff around to free up a 1.5TB drive and decided to install OVM on that.

The installation went well, but I made the schoolboy error of overwriting the bootloader on the MBR. After the restart it was all completely toilet. 🙁 This incident left me checking my underwear because the Fedora installation contained a load of VMs, including RAC and Data Guard installations. None of them were that important, but they would be a pig to set up again.

To sort it I booted from the Fedora 15 DVD and did a repair, telling it to recreate the bootloader on the MBR. A few seconds later, normal service was resumed. Phew.

So then I retried the OVM installation on the clean drive, remembering not to place the bootloader on the MBR this time. The installation went fine again. I booted into Fedora 15, edited my “/etc/grub.conf” to include a chainloader entry. I rebooted and picked the chainloader line from my grub screen only to find I got “Error 21: Selected disk not found”.

After a bit of investiagtion it seems only my RAID1 system disk is visible to grub. The controller doesn’t seem to be able to present the individual disks, unless I kill the RAID1 config. Crappy controller.

So I now have two options:

  1. Buy another disk (or move this “spare” one) and put it into another machine with a sane controller and dual boot that.
  2. Buy another box that is dedicated to OVM.

I kind like option 2, since dual boot is a total pain. All my boxes have a purpose and having something missing while I play with OVM is not ideal. Trouble is it’s more money and it is a machine that is likely to be unused a lot of the time. Seems a bit of a waste.

If only VirtualBox exposed dmidecode to guests, then I could install OVM on a VirtualBox VM. I know it sounds stupid, but it would make functional testing a lot simpler, even if the performance were a little crappy. Never mind…

Cheers

Tim…

Censorship: A confusing subject…

I used to be totally against any form of censorship, but as I’ve got older and I have two young nephews I find myself becoming a bit of an old fuddy-duddy about it. I kinda want to protect their innocence as much as possible.

When I’m in the car with my nephews and the news starts I try to flick to a CD to avoid the talk about sex, drugs, rape and murder. Call me a coward, but I want to avoid the barrage of questions on those subjects and the whole can of worms they will open. I remember one such occasion when nephew number 1 asked me what they meant by, “found her body in a ditch”, after listening to the news on our national radio station (Radio1). Shudder…

I kinda like the idea of everyone taking responsibility for themselves on the censorship front. Having said that you can’t be with them 100% of the time etc.

So now on to the item that prompted this post…

My favorite advert at the moment is from Google. It’s one of those generic, “Use all Google products because they are hip and so by extension, using them makes you hip!”, type adds. Why do I like it? Purely because of the music. It’s a track called Traktor by Wretch 32, which I love. Why did it prompt this post? As with most hip-hop songs is contains some adult language and themes. So what did Google choose to censor? The words in bold were blanked in the add.

“My lifestyle’s terribly wild, but you’ll never catch me on the Jeremy Kyle show”

“Explosive, terrorist style. Don’t think I’m a blow I’ll get you therapy now woah”

“I ride this mothafucking beat like a tractor. I ride this mothafucking beat like a train”

“Zoom zoom down the rabbit hole. More women more alcohol here”

So “Jeremy Kyle” is censored, which I can understand because his show is truly worthy of the “Jeremy Vile” nickname. The word “terrorist” is censored, which seems a little odd to me. The song is not promoting terrorism, so it hardly seems worth messing with. What is surprising is that “mothafucking” (not my spelling) is not blanked. Well to be fair they do play some traffic noises over it, but it is still clearly audible in the chorus. Seems a little strange for an add that runs throughout the day, especially since this was blanked on the radio edit of the song. As for the last quote, I assume somebody at Google understood what that meant before they OKed it in a national advert right? 🙂

Censorship is a very tricky subject, because as this advert shows, we all have different opinions on what should (if anything) be censored.

Cheers

Tim…

Conan the Barbarian…

Being a former Arnie fan, I wasn’t holding out much hope for the remake of Conan the Barbarian. As it turns out I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t that bad really.

Jason Momoa is a decent Conan. He’s not physically as massive as Arnie was in his day, but he sure looks like it would hurt if he punched you. He has a face built for sneering and scowling, which is pretty important in this role. Most of his dialog consists of grunting and throaty sentences that make Barry White sound like a Castrato.

The story is pretty average. It’s never going to win an oscar, but it is suitable for a film of this genre. Just enough to link together the action scenes, with only a mild sprinkling of cheese here and there. The battlefield caesarean was true comedy, but I think it was meant to be serious.

The action scenes themselves were a little hit and miss. Some worked really well, but some were a little blurry and shaky. Some of the scenes were cut badly, making it hard to follow the thread of the action. On occasion it got a little hard to see what was going on and I found myself losing interest.

Despite everything, it was a nice bit of moronic fun. I must buy the Arnie films on DVD… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Australia Trip Conclusion…

I’m back home from my Australia trip, so I thought I would post a brief summary post of the whole trip…

The trip out:
No major drama here. Only 1 delay, after we boarded the plane in Dubai. It turned a 14 hour flight into 15 hours on the plane, but it wasn’t a major drama. Emirates managed lose my special meal allocation, so they had to cobble together a vegetarian meal for me on both their flights. One of these contained prawns, so that got left. 🙂

Events:
In my brief time in Australia I managed to speak at 3 events. The main event for the trip was InSync11 of course, but the addition of the Sydney Oracle Meetup and ACTOUG events make it a lot easier to justify traveling such a long way. Three events in four days is a little crazy, but it certainly didn’t leave any time to get bored. 🙂 Thanks to everyone involved for making this go smoothly for me.

The trip home:
No delays during the trip home. Emirates even managed to get my food almost right. One vegetarian and one vegan. 🙂 Unfortunately, they managed to lose my seat allocation for one flight, so my 14 hour flight was not an aisle seat. This normally freaks me out, but fortunately I managed not to get out of my seat every 15 minutes or so.

I made a few single-serving friends on the way home:

  • One guy was doing the systems for theaters, which included music, lights, stage automation and back office systems. Sounded kinda cool.
  • I was sleeping on the floor near a check in desk in Dubai and a lady from my previous flight recognized me and woke me up just in time for boarding my last flight. For that she qualifies as my best single-serving friend of the trip!
  • The young guy next to me on my Dubai – Birmingham flight had won/earned a holiday in Dubai in a competition. It was all about memorizing and reciting The Koran. He won a regional heat and progressed to the UK final and won it. Pretty cool.
  • The guy next to him was on his way home after visiting his Filipino girlfriend. It turned out we liked most of the same films and were both big fans of The Dresden Files books. So sad how excited two grown men can get when discussing Harry Dresden. We swapped a few tips on authors we thought each other would like etc.

Sleep:
This was by far the most bizarre trip I have ever done where sleep is concerned. I never sleep really well on planes, which is a problem. Both trips started in the evening, so it made the total time from bed-to-bed ridiculously long. In Australia I seemed to follow a day-on/day-off sleeping pattern. I would alternate between about 6 hours sleep one night, then about 1.5-3 hours the next. By the time I was due to go home I was feeling like I was in a rather altered state.

I decided to go to Canberra airport early and slept on the floor for about 2 hours. As soon as I got to Dubai I did the same thing. I think both these sleep breaks are just about the only thing that kept me sane during the trip home.

Once home I went to bed and slept for 18 hours. I’ve just been to the gym and I think I’m going to right-off the rest of the day and try and sleep again.

So now I have 5 weeks to get myself ready for OOW11. The combination of the ACE Director meetings and OOW itself makes it a very long trip, so I need to be in top form to get through it without feeling like a zombie.

Thanks to everyone I met during the events. You all helped to make it a great trip.

Cheers

Tim…