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 21.2 version of ORDS and SQLcl dropped at the start of the month. I guess I missed that, as the first I noticed was Alex Nuijten talking about SQLcl 21.2 nearly two weeks later. As soon as I realised they had arrived I downloaded them and went to work.
All of the relevant Vagrant and Docker builds were updated to use ORDS 21.2, SQLcl 21.2 and Tomcat 9.0.50.
The Oracle security patches come out next week, so these builds will be updated again to include the latest versions of OpenJDK (AdoptOpenJDK) and the Oracle database patches where necessary.
SQL Developer and Database Modeler
These aren’t anything to do with my builds, but thought is was worth mentioning. The 21.2 version of SQL Developer and Data Modeler have been available for the last few days. You can read Jeff’s announcement here.
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.
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. 🙂
While I was playing around with VirtualBox I noticed Vagrant 2.2.15 has been released. You can download it here.
I’ve installed both of those on Windows 10, macOS Big Sur and Oracle Linux 7 hosts. So far so good.
With the release of the Oracle patches I’ll be doing a lot of Vagrant and Docker builds in the coming days, so I should get to exercise this pretty well.
I’ll also do the Packer builds of my Vagrant boxes with the new versions of the guest additions. They take a while to upload, so they should appear on Vagrant Cloud in the next couple of days.
We got Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) 20.4 and SQLcl 20.4, which I use in a number of my Vagrant and Docker builds, so I updated them and ran some builds.
The Vagrant database builds, which include ORDS, can be found here.
I also updated Tomcat to 9.0.41 and OpenJDK to 11.0.10_9 from AdoptOpenJDK.
Once I finished those I decided to try out the Oracle database 19c (19.10) OJVM+DB combo patch on a single instance build. That went fine. You can see that build here.
Since that went OK, I figured it was worth trying to update my OL8 19c RAC build with the 19.10 OJVM+GI combo patch. That also went fine. You can see that build there.
I wasn’t really expecting to cover so much ground so quickly, but that’s the great thing about automation. 🙂
Tomorrow I’ve got to start putting together all the patch scripts for work. It’s always a bit tedious because I have to deal with a lot more products and variations, and I have to make sure I don’t screw up. Happy patching… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
PS. If you are interesting in ORDS, SQLcl, Vagrant or Docker, these might help.
In a previous post I discussed the recent release of APEX 20.2 and the subsequent builds it triggered. Last night I pulled down ORDS 20.3 and SQLcl 20.3, so I updated my Vagrant and Docker builds again.
The ORDS download page is here. At the time of writing, the SQLcl download page is still showing 20.2, but the SQL Developer download page has a link for the 20.3 SQLcl download at the bottom. Both these versions have been available for about a week. Update: It’s showing 20.3 on both SQLcl pages now. 🙂
Vagrant
All my GitHub Vagrant builds that include ORDS and SQLcl have been updated to use version 20.3.
I had previously updated Tomcat, and a few days ago I updated Java as soon as AdoptOpenJDK was available.
Docker
This is pretty much the same as the Vagrant story.
The relevant GitHub Docker builds, like the ORDS containers, have been updated to include ORDS and SQLcl 20.3.
They are on the latest release of Tomcat and Java from AdoptOpenJDK.
Conclusion
As always, this is made simple using automation! 🙂
In today’s video we’ll discuss how to build a 2-node RAC setup using Vagrant.
This video is based on the OL8 19c RAC build, but it’s similar to that of the OL7 19c RAC build also. If you don’t have access to the patches from MOS, stick with the OL7 build, as it will work with the 19.3 base release. The GitHub repos are listed here.
The video is a talk through of using the build, not an explanation of each individual step in the build, as that would be a really long video. If you just want a RAC to play with, run the build and you’ll have one. If you want to learn about the steps involved in doing a RAC build, read the scripts that make up the build. Please don’t ask for a GUI step through of a build or I’ll be forced to ask you to read Why no GUI installations anymore? 🙂
The star of today’s video is Neil Chandler, who seems to be doing a bit of plumbing! 🙂
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. 🙂
I had a little bit of VirtualBox and Vagrant drama today.
I was doing my normal thing of recreating some test VMs and I started to get errors like this during the first part of the VM build, before the config scripts ran.
==> default: Machine booted and ready!
Got different reports about installed GuestAdditions version:
Virtualbox on your host claims:
VBoxService inside the vm claims: 6.1.12
Going on, assuming VBoxService is correct…
[default] GuestAdditions seems to be installed (6.1.12) correctly, but not running.
Got different reports about installed GuestAdditions version:
Virtualbox on your host claims:
VBoxService inside the vm claims: 6.1.12
Going on, assuming VBoxService is correct…
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl start vboxadd.service
Job for vboxadd.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status vboxadd.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl start vboxadd-service.service
Job for vboxadd-service.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status vboxadd-service.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
Got different reports about installed GuestAdditions version:
Virtualbox on your host claims:
VBoxService inside the vm claims: 6.1.12
Going on, assuming VBoxService is correct…
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Starting.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel
modules. This may take a while.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: To build modules for other installed kernels, run
VirtualBox Guest Additions: /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup
VirtualBox Guest Additions: or
VirtualBox Guest Additions: /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup all
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Kernel headers not found for target kernel
5.4.17-2011.5.3.el8uek.x86_64. Please install them and execute
/sbin/rcvboxadd setup
ValueError: File context for /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.1.12/other/mount.vboxsf already defined
modprobe vboxguest failed
The log file /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log may contain further information.
==> default: Checking for guest additions in VM…
default: No guest additions were detected on the base box for this VM! Guest
default: additions are required for forwarded ports, shared folders, host only
default: networking, and more. If SSH fails on this machine, please install
default: the guest additions and repackage the box to continue.
default:
default: This is not an error message; everything may continue to work properly,
default: in which case you may ignore this message.
The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status.
Vagrant assumes that this means the command failed!
/usr/sbin/rcvboxadd setup
Stdout from the command:
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Starting.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel
modules. This may take a while.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: To build modules for other installed kernels, run
VirtualBox Guest Additions: /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup
VirtualBox Guest Additions: or
VirtualBox Guest Additions: /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup all
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Kernel headers not found for target kernel
5.4.17-2011.5.3.el8uek.x86_64. Please install them and execute
/sbin/rcvboxadd setup
Stderr from the command:
ValueError: File context for /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.1.12/other/mount.vboxsf already defined
modprobe vboxguest failed
The log file /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log may contain further information.
The VM had booted, but because the guest additions weren’t working it couldn’t mount the shared folders, so none of the setup scripts had run.
Reading the output I figured the kernel-uek-devel package was missing from the Vagrant box, so I did the following…
I connected to the VM, installed the “kernel-uek-devel” package and exited from the VM.
During this second startup of the VM the problem kernel module was rebuilt, and the rest of the configuration steps ran the way you would expect from a normal first-time startup.
One of the issues about using someone else’s Vagrant box is you are at the mercy of what they decide to do with it. In this case I was using the ‘bento/oracle-8’ Vagrant box, which was built using Oracle Linux 8.2 with UEK 6, but the installed guest additions were not happy, and the packages were not present to allow the kernel module to be rebuilt on the fly.
If you are trying to use my Vagrant builds, which mostly use the ‘bento/oracle-8’ Vagrant box, and you are getting this type of issue, now you know what to do about it. Hopefully the next release of this Vagrant box will be less problematic.
Cheers
Tim…
Update: I spent some time figuring out Packer, and now I’ve switched all my OL8 builds to use my own image called ‘oraclebase/oracle-8’.
