Tag: Linux

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 : Docker : Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) Build

In today’s video we’ll take a look at a simple Docker build for Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS). In this example we’re using Tomcat on Oracle Linux 8 (oraclelinux:8-slim), which is connecting to an Oracle 19c database.

This video is based on the following articles and links.

The star of today’s video is Colm Divilly, of ORDS fame. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Video : Oracle Linux 8 Installation

Today’s video is a quick run through a manual installation of Oracle Linux 8.

I put out a number of articles about Oracle Linux 8 when the beta was first released. I’ve now updated them where appropriate.

I’ve also gone through my Vagrant builds for 18c on OL8 and 19c on OL8. They work fine, although there isn’t a Vagrant box for OL8 yet, so I had to make my own using the method similar to this.

Remember, OL8 has only just come out, so the database is not certified on it yet. I’ve put at note a the top of the database installation guides saying as much.

The star of today’s video is Mahir M. Quluzade. He was grinning most of the way through filming this. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Dbvisit Standby 9 Installation on Linux (and Vagrant)

The folks at Dbvisit recently released version 9 of their Dbvisit standby product.

It’s been a while since I last played with the product, so I downloaded the free trial and gave it a whirl.

I have to admit I forgot just how easy it is to work with. It feels pretty much like “unzip and go”. The result of my playtime was this article.

I also knocked up a Vagrant build, so I can easily recreate it. You can find that here.

I stuck to a basic configuration of a single instance primary (node1) and standby (node2), with the console on a separate VM (console). If you want to try something more exotic, or you are using Windows, you can get more information from the Installing Dbvisit Standby documentation.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. This isn’t a sponsored post. I’ve known the folks at Dbvisit for years so I keep an eye on what they are doing.

Oracle 18c and 19c on Oracle Linux 8 (beta)

Fresh on the back of yesterday’s Fedora 30 post, I noticed a post from Avi Miller about the release of Oracle Linux 8 Beta. I had a day off work, so once I had finished the Fedora 30 builds, I started on the Oracle Linux 8 builds.

It should be obvious, but this is a beta release of the OS, so everything below is just me playing. It will all have to be done again, and done “properly” once the final release appears. Even then, it will be a while before anything is certified against the new OS, so don’t take this seriously.

I’ve pushed some stuff up to GitHub. It uses a Vagrant box I created myself, in the same way I wrote about here.

I think it’s time I did something “real”, rather than playing around with stuff that doesn’t relate to something I would do at work. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Database 18.3.0 On-Prem for Linux

I was just about to go to bed when I saw this post by Mike Dietrich. Yay!

I’ve had access to 18c on the Oracle Cloud for some time, so I’ve already been able to write a bunch of stuff about it (see here), but it always feels geekier when it’s running on your own kit. It also makes demos a little less dangerous if you can fall back to your own machine. 🙂

Of course I’m starting the downloads now, so maybe I’ll get to have a play tomorrow? 🙂 If you want it you can grab it from here.

Happy upgrading…

Cheers

Tim…

Mac updates disaster (again) and a return to Windows desktop?

A couple of nights ago I tweeted about my MacBook Pro being a brick after the latest updates were applied. It was totally unresponsive. The only thing that would work is the “Option” key at boot to alter the boot order.

This is not the first time this has happened to me, and not just on this machine. I think in total I’ve had to restore the entire OS from TimeMachine three times. Once on a previous MBP and twice on the latest one. Twice it was after updates and once because it just stopped working and I never found out why.

Being a DBA, backups are my thing, so I have a TimeMachine partition on my NAS, as well as manual backups for some of the important things, which in turn get pushed up to an AWS bucket. For good measure I also have an external drive with some backups on, because it always pays to be prepared. 🙂

Due to past issues I always keep a Mac Recovery USB Drive waiting to go. This is how I recovered from the latest issue. The recovery took 6+ hours, then it took about 30+ minutes to apply the update that started all this fiasco. So I now have a patched and working MBP again, for now…

I also mentioned on Twitter I might be moving back to Windows for my main desktop, possibly even installing it on the MBP. That prompted a few comments, so I figured I would mention my current opinions on the top-3 Operating Systems, from a *desktop perspective*.

macOS

I bought my first MacBook Pro in 2009 and have used one as my travel machine since then. About 2.5 years ago I bought a 15″ retina, which became my home desktop machine, and travel laptop combined. The 2009 13″ MBP is next to my bed, used every day as my Netflix machine. 🙂

I was convinced to give Macs a go because loads of people at conferences kept telling me how good macOS was. It’s over 8 years, but I’m still waiting to fall in love with it. This seems to have happened for other people instantly, but I just don’t see the major appeal.

I still find it annoying how little support there is for Macs from software companies. Most of what I want to do it fine, but every now and then I want to try something and it’s not supported on Mac, or I’ve got to wait a few months for the Mac version to be released. It’s still a Windows world, so I’m still using Windows VMs occasionally.

The only really positive thing I can say is I like the build quality of the case, but after my Staingate issue and a problem with the fan I had in the first few weeks of the latest machine, I’m not sure the build quality is quite what it was when I bought my first MBP.

Linux

I first used Linux in the RedHat 5.1 days (not RHEL), which Wikipedia tells me was 1998. At some point I ditched Windows at home and Red Hat Linux became my main desktop. I can’t remember which exact version I switched to, but I’m thinking Red Hat Linux 8. When Red Hat Linux became Fedora I made that move also. When I started to do presentations I bought a laptop which used Windows Vista, which wasn’t as bad as people made out. Later on I switched to a MacBook Pro, but Fedora was my main desktop OS until about 2.5 years ago. Once again, I can’t remember the exact version, but it was one of the 20’s. Somewhere between Fedora 21 and 23 at a guess. Since moving away from a Linux desktop I have kept up with Fedora for every release, but it’s not been a 100% desktop for me.

I learned a lot by using Linux as my desktop, but I spent a lot of time trying to get round device compatibility issues, or get what felt like part-finished software to work. I was forever having to use Wine or Mono to run additional software because the Linux support didn’t exist, or didn’t really work properly. I was also having to use a Windows VM to run some software I needed for my business. Like I said, great learning experience, but hardly what I would call an efficient use of time for a regular user.

Someone on Twitter asked me what I wanted from a Linux desktop and I said,

“Support for all apps I want to use and devices, without having to do weekend projects to fix problems…”

Jared Still commented,

“Twice I have made serious attempts to use Linux on a laptop. It is just too fiddly; every time something New needs to be done it is a new project. All my Databases run on Linux, I do dev on Linux, but it was just too much trouble for many common tasks.”

I agree. I am a total devotee of Linux on the server, but using Linux on the desktop is not a viable option for me. Been there. Done it for a lot of years. Moved on!

Windows

I wrote my PhD thesis on Microsoft Word using Windows 3.11. At every job I’ve ever had, Windows has been my main desktop OS, so I’ve lived through all the versions since Windows 3.11. Even when I switched to Linux at home, I was using Windows at work, and supporting family members using Windows. My work desktop still uses Windows 7, but as of next week it will be Windows 10. My family used Windows 8.0, then 8.1 and now Windows 10. Like most IT people, I have to support family PCs, so it was me who did the upgrades and I’ve used these versions a lot. I’m doing the last minute checks to this post on my brother’s Windows 10 laptop.

Windows is far from perfect, but if you’ve not been using it regularly for the last few years, I think you might be surprised. I like Windows 10.

Conclusion

I think my next move will be Windows.

I have a long history of all three operating systems, so it’s not like I’m going into this blind. I think I probably have a better grounding in all three than most of the people who are trying to push their preference on me. 🙂

Most of the time I am in a shell or a browser, so I can work OK on all three operating systems without much trouble, but it’s when I want to go off piste the differences start to become evident.

You don’t have to agree with me. My choice does not mean your choice is wrong. Likewise, your choice doesn’t mean my choice is wrong.

Cheers

Tim…

Docker : My First Steps

In a blog post after OpenWorld I mentioned I might not be writing so much for a while as something at work was taking a lot of my “home time”, which might result in some articles, but then again might not… Well, that something was Docker…

After spending a couple of years saying I was going to start looking at Docker, in June I wrote a couple of articles, put them on the website, but didn’t mention them to anyone.  I was finding it quite hard to focus on Docker because of all the fun I was having with ORDS. More recently it became apparent that we have a couple of use-cases for Docker at work, one of which involved ORDS, so it reignited my interest. There’s nothing like actually needing to use something to make you knuckle down and learn it… 🙂

Having gone back to revisit Docker, I realised the two articles I wrote were terrible, which wasn’t surprising considering how little time I had spent using Docker at that point. The more I used Docker, the more I realised I had totally missed the point. I had come to it with too many preconceptions, mostly relating to virtualization, that were leading me astray. I reached out to a few people (Gerald Venzl, Bruno Borges & Avi Miller) for help and advice, which got me back on track…

I’ve been playing around with Docker a lot lately, which has resulted in a few articles, with some more on the way. I’m not trying to make out I’m “the Docker guy” now, because I’m clearly not. I’m not suggesting you use my Docker builds, because there are better ones around, like these. I’m just trying to learn this stuff and I do that by playing and writing. If other people find that useful and want to follow me on the journey, that’s great. If you prefer to go straight to the source (docs.docker.com) that’s probably a better idea. 🙂

I do a lot of rewrites of articles on my website in general. This is especially true of these Docker articles, which seem to be in a permanent state of flux at the moment. Part of me wanted to wait until I was a little more confident about it all, because I didn’t want to make all my mistakes in public, then part of me thought, “sod it!”

If you want to see what I’ve been doing all the articles are on my website and the Dockerfiles on Github.

I’m having a lot of fun playing around with Docker. You could say, I’m having a “whale” of a time! (I’ll get my coat…)

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Linux Upgrade : It’s a Sorry State!

It’s 2017 and it’s still not possible to reliably upgrade an Enterprise Linux distribution between major versions!

At this point you are scrolling down to the comments to “educate me” about the redhat-upgrade-tool, because you read about it somewhere and you once heard someone successfully upgraded an installation on a lab machine. Unless you have an ultra vanilla starting point, you are going to end up with a mess that probably won’t boot. By the time you come to upgrade a “real server”, there have been years of changes and it is unlikely to resemble some pristine minimal installation.

I know your next comment is going to be something about the architectural changes brought in by project X and version Y in RHEL7, which is why it is all so hard. Stop now! You are boring me already! Is it an enterprise distribution or isn’t it? If it is, you should be able to upgrade it reliably!

Next up comes, “But you have to reinstall when you get new hardware!” I present to you virtual machines. Physical hardware upgrades with no need to reinstall the OS on the VM.

I can’t believe I’ve been using Linux for about 19 years and this is where we are at.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Linux 12cR2 Preinstall Package

I was doing some clean Oracle Linux 6 and 7 installs today and look what I noticed in the yum repository for OL6.

Available Packages
oracle-database-server-12cR2-preinstall.x86_64 1.0-1.el6 public_ol6_latest
oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall.x86_64 1.0-13.el6 public_ol6_latest
oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall.x86_64 1.0-14.el6 public_ol6_latest

And for OL7.

Available Packages
oracle-database-server-12cR2-preinstall.x86_64 1.0-2.el7 ol7_latest
oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall.x86_64 1.0-4.el7 ol7_latest
oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall.x86_64 1.0-5.el7 ol7_latest

A quick look at the repos and it first turned up in September. I’m surprised I’ve not noticed it before now…

Cheers

Tim…