Tag: builds

ORDS and APEX 22.1 : Vagrant and Docker Builds

I was on top of the recent ORDS 22.1 release, but somehow I managed to miss the APEX 22.1 release. Here’s an update on what’s been going on with my builds…

Vagrant Builds

A number of my Vagrant database builds include APEX. Those that do have been updated to use APEX 22.1. You can find them here.

They had already been updated to use the latest versions of Java, Tomcat, ORDS and SQLcl where appropriate, so the APEX upgrade was a small change. The ORDS update was done 11 days ago. It was a bigger update, as the installation process for ORDS 22.1 has changed quite a bit. I wrote about that here.

You can read my beginner’s guide to Vagrant here.

Docker/Container Builds

I have some ORDS containers that include the APEX images, so those image builds have been updated to use ORDS 22.1 and APEX 22.1 images now.

APEX is also included in the database builds. You can find them here.

I was a little slow to add the updates to the Docker builds. The Tomcat and SQLcl changes were done a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only added the Java, ORDS and APEX changes today. I held back a little on the ORDS 22.1 changes, as I was rewriting a bunch of articles that were affected by the installation and configuration changes.

You can read my Docker/Container articles here.

Real Life

We probably won’t be putting APEX 22.1 live until the next patching cycle, which will be July. In the past I could be quite aggressive about the upgrades, but as APEX is becoming more important in the organisation, the rollout of updates has to be a bit more considered. 🙂

The same will probably be true for the ORDS 22.1 rollout. We run ORDS in containers, so it’s really quick and easy to replace all the infrastructure, but I wanted to be a bit cautious because of all the changes in the new version. Having played with it a bit now, I’m feeling a lot more confident, but at the time we were starting our patching cycle I was too nervous to include it.

As far as home systems are concerned, I only use the latest and greatest, unless there is a compelling reason not to. 😉

Cheers

Tim…

Updates to Vagrant and Docker Builds (Oracle Patches and Upgrades)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will know there have been a load of software patches and updates released recently. As a result I’ve been constantly updating my Vagrant and Docker builds as each one has dropped. With the release of ORDS 21.1, the main push for this quarter is done.

This is just a heads-up of what’s been happening.

Packer : My Packer builds of OL7 and OL8 Vagrant boxes have been updated and pushed to Vagrant Cloud. This ended up happening twice due to the quick release of VirtualBox 6.1.22 a few days after 6.1.20.

Vagrant : All relevant builds now have the latest Java 11, Tomcat 9, ORDS 12.1 and SQLcl 21.1 versions. Where necessary the database patches are included. I mostly try to do builds with stock releases, so people without a support contract can still use them, but some things require the patches to function properly. If you follow the blog you will already know the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.5 builds have now been included.

Docker/Containers : Similar to Vagrant, all relevant builds now have the latest Java 11, Tomcat 9, ORDS 12.1 and SQLcl 21.1 versions. Database patches are updated where necessary.

There is still some stuff on the horizon though. With the new version of APEX dropping on the apex.oracle.com, I expect a new on-prem release soon (see update). There is also the on-prem release of Oracle database 21c, which I’m hoping drops soon. Once it does I will be adding those builds…

Cheers

Tim…

Update: APEX 21.1 dropped today (12-May-2021) just after publishing this post. It’s been added to all the builds now. 🙂

APEX 19.2 : Vagrant and Docker Builds

I’m sure anyone who cares knows that APEX 19.2 was officially released on Friday. I did an upgrade of one of our development instances straight away and it worked fine. it’s subsequently gone to a bunch of other development instances. I’ll be pushing to get this out to production as quickly as possible.

Over the weekend I worked through a bunch of my GitHub stuff.

Vagrant : I’ve updated all my Vagrant builds to use APEX 19.2 and the latest versions of Tomcat 9 and OpenJDK 11. I was using newer versions of OpenJDK, but it seemed a bit silly, so I reverted back to the long term support release. I tried updating the base box to ‘bento/oracle-7.7’, but it kept giving me timeouts, so I’ve reverted back to ‘bento/oracle-7.6’ for the moment.

Docker : Same as above, I’ve updated all my Docker builds to use APEX 19.2 and the latest versions of Tomcat 9 and OpenJDK 11. I noticed oraclelinux:8-slim was behaving a little strangely. I thought it was a PATH issue, but I need to spend some time to understand what is happening. It seems you can’t run basic commands like dnf during the build phase. It’s probably something stupid I’m doing, but for now I’ve switched from oraclelinux:8-slim to oraclelinux:8. Just making that switch made everything work as expected.

My Docker builds within the company have gone through a similar process, so as I’m rolling out APEX 19.2 to the databases, I’m also switching the ORDS containers over to the new images. You gotta love containers!

I guess I’ll be working through all this again when the next version of ORDS and SQLcl drop. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

VirtualBox and Vagrant : New RAC Stuff and Changes

There were a lot of changes in my Vagrant repository on GitHub last week and over the weekend.

First, I got asked a question about 12.2 RAC and I couldn’t be bothered to run through a manual build, so I took my 18c RAC hands-off build and amended it to create a 12.2 RAC hands-off build. Along the way I noticed a couple of hard-coded bits in the 18c build I hadn’t noticed previously, which I altered of course. I also had to move the 18c build to a version-specific sub-directory. I think I’ve altered all references to the location.

I went through some of my individual server builds and updated them to use the latest versions of Tomcat 9, Java 11 and APEX 18.2. All that was pretty straight forward.

On Sunday I was running some tests of the builds on my laptop while I was at my brother’s house, and I noticed I was not pulling packages from the yum repositories properly. I ended up adding “nameserver 8.8.8.8” to pretty much all the “/etc/resolv.conf” files inside the VMs. I’m not sure what has changed as that hasn’t happened before, so I’m not sure if it’s something to do with the networking… Anyway, it fixed everything, so happy days.

While I was doing these builds I learned something new. I forgot to amend the path to my ASM disks from a UNIX style path “/u05/VirtualBox/shared/ol7_183_rac/…” to a Windows style path. Vagrant didn’t care and just created the location under the C drive as “C:\u05\VirtualBox\shared\ol7_183_rac\”. I’ll have to add a note about that to my “README.md” files about that.

I’ve still got to update some Docker builds with the latest software. I’ll probably do that over this week…

Cheers

Tim…

 

More Server Builds and Presenting…

Server Builds

My room is full of servers again. I’m still rebuilding loads of kit to send to the new site. Yesterday I installed RHEL4 on two servers ready for 10gR2 installations, and RHEL3 on three servers ready for AS10g (9.0.4) installations. The versions, especially App Server, may sound strange, but this is to duplicate the current environment, so my hands are tied. 🙂

The three application servers are all going to be installed as 1 node clusters, so we can configure and test them before releasing the remaining nodes. Just trying to reduce the impact of the move.

Hopefully, by the end of today we will have at least one node for every layer in the new production and test environments.

It’s not long until I leave this company, so I’m really keen to get everything moved and bulletproof.

Presenting

OpenWorld: Booked, and I’m ready to go.

AUSOUG: I’ve just received confirmation of my conference presentations in Australia. I’m presenting two papers at both the Perth and Gold Coast events.

NZOUG: I’ve been confirmed for the New Zealand conference in Rotorua, but I don’t know how many papers I’m presenting yet.

One of my friends is trying to sort out a presentation at a local user group in New Zealand after the main conference is over. Seems a shame to go all that way and not do as much as possible.

So it looks like the world tour is back on. 🙂

By the end of the year I will have been to Austria, Denmark, Estonia, America, Australia and New Zealand. I guess this seems a little tame for some of the consultants out there, but for a regular Joe DBA / Developer from Birmingham it seems a bit crazy.

Cheers

Tim…