The quarterly Oracle security patches trigger a whole bunch of build changes for me. This post just gives you a run through of what happened over the weekend.
Packer
The release of VirtualBox 6.1.36 means all my Vagrant boxes on Vagrant Cloud have the wrong guest additions, so I rebuilt all of them using Packer. The Oracle Linux 7, 8 and 9 boxes are now up to date. You can see my Packer builds under my Vagrant repository on GitHub here.
Note. During the packer builds I noticed the VirtualBox 6.1.36 guest additions require some extra packages during the installation (libX11, libXt, libXext, libXmu).
Vagrant
I had recently updated all relevant Vagrant builds with the latest versions of Tomcat, SQLcl and ORDS updates, but I was still waiting on the OpenJDK 11.0.16 release. On Friday morning I noticed Adoptium released it, so I made the necessary changes to the builds to include it. I usually don’t include Oracle patches in my database builds, but some installations, like Oracle 19c on OL8, require them. I’ve updated them to include the 19.16 patches where necessary. You can find my Vagrant builds on GitHub here.
Similar to the Vagrant section above, the relevant Docker/Podman builds were updated to use OpenJDK 11.0.16, and the Oracle 19c on OL8 build had it’s patch script modified for the 19.16 patches. You can find my container stuff on GitHub here.
When I shutdown some VMs before the VirtualBox upgrade, I noticed Vagrant 2.2.18 had been released. Downloads here.
I’ll need to rebuild my Vagrant boxes again, so I thought I should check if there was a new Packer version. Sure enough, Packer 1.7.4 was available. Downloads here. It came out just over a week ago, but I hadn’t noticed.
They are all installed now, so I’ve just got to start doing some Vagrant box builds. Happy days… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Update: I used Packer to rebuild my OL7 and OL8 vagrant boxes. They are now uploaded to Vagrant Cloud.
The recent release of APEX 20.2 has triggered a build frenzy.
Vagrant
All my GitHub Vagrant builds that include APEX have been updated to APEX 20.2. The builds themselves are unchanged. This was literally an update to the environment files, so it took longer to test the builds than it did to make the changes.
While I was at it, I did a couple of extra updates. I updated Tomcat to version 9.0.39 on all relevant builds, and updated the optional patch script for the single instance database 19c on OL8 build to use the October 2020 bundle patch. The GI bundle isn’t available yet, so I’ve not altered the OL8 19c RAC build. That will happen soon.
Update: I’ve got the GI bundle patch now, and the OL8 19c RAC build has been updated to use it.
There will of course be more updates to the builds once we get the new versions of AdoptOpenJDK, ORDS and SQLcl, that are probably coming soon.
This is pretty much the same as the Vagrant story.
The relevant GitHub Docker builds for Oracle database and ORDS containers have been updated to include APEX 20.2.
I’ve also added Tomcat 9.0.39 to the ORDS builds, and updated the optional patch script for the database 19c on OL8 build to use the October 2020 bundle patch.
Once again, more changes will appear as the new versions of AdoptOpenJDK, ORDS and SQLcl appear.
Conclusion
Automation is awesome! A few minutes and we are bang up to date!
A few days ago I wrote about some Vagrant Box Drama I was having. Martin Bach replied saying I should build my own Vagrant boxes. I’ve built Vagrant boxes manually before, as shown here.
The manual process is just boring, so I’ve tended to use other people’s Vagrant boxes, like “bento/oracle-8”, but then you are at the mercy of what they decide to include/exclude in their box. Martin replied again saying,
“Actually I thought the same until I finally managed to get around automating the whole lots with Packer and Ansible. Works like a dream now and with minimum effort”
So that kind-of shamed me into taking a look at Packer. 🙂
I’d seen Packer before, but had not really spent any time playing with it, because I didn’t plan on being in the business of maintaining Vagrant box images. Recent events made me revisit that decision a little.
So over the weekend I spent some time playing with Packer. Packer can build all sorts of images, including Vagrant boxes (VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V etc.) and images for Cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and Oracle Cloud. I focused on trying to build a Vagrant box for Oracle Linux 8.2 + UEK, and only for a VirtualBox provider, as that’s what I needed.
The Packer docs are “functional”, but not that useful in my opinion. I got a lot more value from Google and digging around other people’s GitHub builds. As usual, you never find quite what you’re looking for, but there are pieces of interest, and ideas you can play with. I was kind-of hoping I could fork someone else’s repository and go from there, but it didn’t work out that way…
It was surprisingly easy to get something up and running. The biggest issue is time. You are doing a Kickstart installation for each test. Even for minimal installations that takes a while to complete, before you get to the point where you are testing your new “tweak”. If you can muscle your way through the boredom, you quickly get to something kind-of useful.
Eventually I got to something I was happy with and tested a bunch of my Vagrant builds against it, and it all seemed fine, so I then uploaded it to Vagrant Cloud.
I’ve already made some changes and uploaded a new version. 🙂
You will see a couple of older manually built boxes of mine under oraclebase. I’ll probably end up deleting those as they are possibly confusing, and definitely not maintained.
I’ve also altered all my OL8 Vagrant builds to use this box now.
You will also see a new sub-directory called “packer”. I think you can guess what’s in there. If I start to do more with this I may move it to its own repository, but for now this is fine.
I’m not really sure what else I will do with Packer from here. I will probably do an Oracle Linux 7 build, which will be very similar to what I already have. This first image is pretty large, as I’ve not paid much attention to reducing it’s size. I’ve looked at what some other builds do, and I’m not sure I agree with some of the stuff they remove. I’m sure I will alter my opinion on this over time.
I’m making no promises about these boxes. That same way I make no promised about any of my GitHub stuff. It’s stuff I’m playing around with, and I will mostly try to keep it up to date, but I’m not an expert and it’s not my job to maintain this. It’s just something that is useful for me, and if you like it, great. If not, there are lots of other places to look for inspiration. 🙂
