Tim Hall

I just noticed a new version of MobaXterm has been released. Not totally sure what has changed in 6.2. I can’t seem to find a changelog.

Fun, fun, fun…

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Fidel pointed out the obvious changelog. Shows how observant I am.

MobaXterm 6.2… was first posted on March 6, 2013 at 10:07 am.
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I forgot to mention the really big news from this last week at work. I have been upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7! I feel so bleeding edge now. I switched to classic theme, so it feels like XP.

I’ve also been switched from Office XP to Office 2010, so I now have that ribbon thing. I think I need a bigger monitor now that ribbon takes most of my screen.

Joking aside, the transition has been really easy and things seem to be working fine. Not sure how long it will take before the first official installations of Windows 8 hit our place. I’ll happily stay behind the bleeding edge on that one.

Cheers

Tim…

I’m so bleeding edge… was first posted on March 3, 2013 at 1:24 pm.
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Oracle will be releasing Oracle Database 12cR1 at some point this year. Many companies will avoid this release, opting to wait for 12cR2, their reasoning being it will be more stable and, as a terminal release, will have a longer support life-cycle. Since 12cR2 is what most businesses care about, what can we do to make it as good as it can possibly be? Here are a few thoughts…

• For a start, you’ve got to use 12cR1 in your organization to understand what it does well and what is a bit crappy about it. If you don’t figure this out during 12cR1, chances are your wishlist will not be ticked off in 12cR2. I’m not saying launch straight into production, but don’t just place your head in the sand either.
• Report every bug you find, even those that already have resolutions in MOS. Lots of people, including myself, complain about how buggy the Oracle database has become as the functionality has expanded. Workload in any organization has to be prioritized. Chances are, the things that people shout about the most are the things that Oracle will get done. If we all make our feelings known by logging every bug that affects us and explain why/how it is impacting on us, it can only help the cause.
• Report bugs in the documentation. The Oracle docs have improved a lot over the years, but there is always room for improvements. In the old days you had to report faults in the documentation as SRs. Now, you just need to add comments directly in the documentation, which is a lot quicker and easier. When you see a problem, report it. If you think something is missing, ask for it. Once again, if enough people shout about something, it may affect the priority.
• File enhancement requests. You often come across things that almost solve your problem, but not quite. If that’s the case, file an enhancement request on MOS. If enough people ask for stuff it will probably get added. Even better if you have an example of how cool that feature is in another DB engine.
• Get involved in beta programs. This is not always as easy as it sounds. I would love to have been involved in the 12cR1 beta program, but I was not considered worthy. If your company can get involved in beta programs it’s a good way to help improve and shape the product. The more issues logged during the beta testing period, the more likely the final product will live up to your expectations.
• Make sure Oracle salespeople know and understand your priorities. At the end of the day, Oracle exist to make money. In most commercial companies the sales department have a disproportionate influence on the direction of the products. At every opportunity, make it know what *your* priorities are. I love the new and geeky stuff, but to be honest, most of the work I see people doing requires little more than what was available in Oracle 7. If bug fixes and stability are more important to you than new functionality, make it known.

I have no knowledge of the internal workings of Oracle as a company, so I can’t guarantee these suggestions will have any impact, but I think of this the same way as I do about voting in elections. If you don’t voice your opinions, you don’t really have any right to complain. If Oracle know exactly what their customers want and don’t deliver, they only have themselves to blame if everything goes wrong. If we as customers don’t make our opinions known, we shouldn’t be surprised if Oracle keep chasing the next buzzword, rather than doing what matters to us.

Cheers

Tim…

How can we make Oracle Database 12cR2 the best release ever? was first posted on March 3, 2013 at 1:06 pm.
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I wrote the following tweet the other day.

I love technology, but hate working in IT. The politics and bullshit drag you down… #baddayatwork

— Tim Hall (@oraclebase) February 28, 2013

I’ve been known to say on numerous occasions,

“Sometimes, a bad decision is better than no decision at all!”

I’m currently reading God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert and I just read this passage, which is a conversation between Leto (The God Emperor) and an Ixian Ambassador.

“The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices”

“Acceptable choices?”

“They usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems.”

“But don’t they sometimes need more information to make…”

“A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors.”

“And good administrators?”

“Oh, they depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they’ve done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it’s too late to make corrections.”

I feel like making giant posters of this quote and pinning them in every room at work.

In IT, most of the good stuff you come across is done by small groups of focused people. Once they get some measure of success the layers of management build up, as do the number of less focused hangers-on, until you end up with a company that is paralyzed by committees and becomes totally stagnant. You see this cycle again and again.

Cheers

Tim…

My current love/hate relationship with working in IT… was first posted on March 2, 2013 at 10:29 pm.
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I just noticed VirtualBox 4.2.8 has been born. The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.

Happy upgrading.

Cheers

Tim…

VirtualBox 4.2.8… was first posted on February 28, 2013 at 9:23 pm.
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I spent yesterday neatening up a few old articles. For the most part it is a bit of a dull process, but it has to be done every so often.

With what’s going on at work, it seemed like a good idea bring my old Kickstart and PXE Installation articles up to date. My kickstart article was written in the RHEL3 era which needed bringing up to date. Nothing has really changed about the process, but some new screen shots from OL6 make it look a little fresher. My old PXE Installation article was written against RHEL5/OL5, so I figured things wouldn’t have changed much between that and RHEL6/OL6… Wrong! I ended up having to write a new article specifically for PXE Installations on RHEL6/OL6.

I think that’s enough of me pretending to be a Linux sysadmin for a while…

Cheers

Tim…

PXE Installations on RHEL6 / OL6 was first posted on February 24, 2013 at 3:19 pm.
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I’ve delayed watching Django Unchained for a few weeks, mostly because it is 3 hours long and I struggle to sit for that long in the cinema, no matter what film I’m watching!

Let me start by saying I’m a big fan of Quentin Tarantino. He’s obviously a smart guy. I like the dialog in his films. He always does interesting things with his characters. I think he’s got a good eye as a director. I kinda like the extreme nature of many of his films. Having said all that I really don’t know what I think about Django Unchained.

So the bullet points that should make me love this film are:

• The dialog is what you would expect from QT.
• The characters are interesting, as you would expect from QT.
• It looks great. Or to put it another way, it looks bad when it is meant to look bad and great when it is meant to look great.
• It is extremely violent at times.
• It has some genuinely funny scenes.

Where I struggle is the racism in the film. Now as I’ve said before, Quentin Tarantino is a smart guy, so I think my reaction to this is what he intended. As well as the obviously funny scenes, there are some “comedy” scenes that I think will draw differing reactions depending your attitudes in this area, kinda like the following:

• If you are a racist you will find them hilarious and be falling off your seat laughing, before renewing your subscription to the British National Party, or the equivalent right-wing racist organization in your country!
• If you are kind-of oblivious to race issues you may find them mildly amusing, or maybe not even notice them.
• If you are sensitive to racism, in whatever form it is presented, you will find them very hard work.

I think this may well be the genius of this film, but ultimately it is what makes me uncomfortable about this film.

It’s a great piece of work. Do I think you need to see it? Yes. Do I think you will enjoy it? I hope you don’t “enjoy” it, but I hope you see its value. Will I ever watch it again? I don’t think so.

Cheers

Tim…

Django Unchained… was first posted on February 23, 2013 at 12:56 pm.
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Children of Dune is the third book in the Dune series written by Frank Herbert.

As I suspected, Children of Dune is a bit random. In summarised form the story would sound quite good, but the books rambles on a lot. I found myself wishing for chapters to end. I’m told by a few people things pick up from here. I’ve already started the next book and so far it sounds pretty promising…

Cheers

Tim…

Children of Dune… was first posted on February 19, 2013 at 8:35 pm.
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Android 4.2.2 dropped a couple of days ago and the updates of my Nexus4 and Nexus7 went without a problem. The reason for this post is to point out something I found amusing about my usage of the Nexus4…

I just attempted to send a text message and noticed my Nexus4 was not connected to my phone network. I don’t think it’s been connected since the update two days ago. When I noticed, I did a search for the phone network, found it and played catch up on a couple of old messages.

What I found amusing is it shows how little I actually need a phone network. I am almost continually in wifi range and most of my communication is via email, twitter and skype, so having no data connection for two days went unnoticed. I’m glad I only pay £8/month.

Cheers

Tim…

Nexus 4 & 7: Android 4.2.2 Updates was first posted on February 16, 2013 at 1:49 pm.
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Followers of the blog will know I dig virtualization. I first ran Oracle in virtualized environments over a decade ago.

In my current company there is a strong virtualization presence in the Windows space. Pretty much all Windows servers, including those running MS SQL Server, are actually VMs running on a VMware farm. The UNIX/Linux side is a little different. Most stuff is still done on physical boxes and what little virtualization is done, uses CentOS and KVM for freebie open source solutions.

There are a lot of architectural changes going on at the moment and I’ve been pushing *very hard* for a switch to the virtual infrastructure (VI) for all our middle tier servers and a few of our databases. It is looking very likely (but not guaranteed) that this will happen.

Q: What is the incentive to switch to a virtualized environment?
A: We have a bad spread of resource utilization at the moment. Some very big boxes doing very little work, but in security zones that are too unsafe to use them for other purposes. Other boxes will soon be maxed out because they have been used to consolidate services. What’s more, some of the servers that are used for consolidation have multiple, conflicting, installations on them which are already starting to cause administration headaches.

Q: How can virtualization help with our resource utilization?
A: Using a 12 core server with 60G of RAM for a little Apache reverse proxy is crazy. For the sake of resilience, we have multiple of these. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine adding those servers to the farm, carving out some little VMs and leaving all the rest of the resources to do cool stuff with. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

Q: How can virtualization products ease our administration headaches?
A: By far the biggest administration headaches we are seeing in the middle tier relate to having multiple installations of products on a single machine. Doing upgrades and trying to remove old software can cause no end of headaches. Some of our old boxes have 30+ installations on them. It does your noggin in when you are trying to find out what is going on. You often spend much more time trying to identify which installation you should be looking at, than actually doing the task you’ve been asked to do. By moving to the VI we can add a greater level of separation between some of these installations, making life much clearer. Our current vision is one installation per VM. To upgrade we set up new VMs, migrate the services on to them and bin the old VMs. Everything remains clean and simple.

Q: What virtualization product should we use?
A: We have a big investment in VMware. There is a dedicated team who manage this infrastructure and know what they are doing. IMHO it is only Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) that prevents other people in the company moving some or all of the Linux stuff on to that infrastructure. Oracle products are only part of the infrastructure, but we understand and accept the Oracle licensing, support and certification implications of this move.

Q: What version of Linux will we be using?
A: Oracle Linux! Yeah baby!

Q: So nothing can go wrong?
A: Don’t be stupid. We are bound to get some pain points, but I think it will be a fantastic move in the right direction.

So now all that remains is to get the final approval and start moving this stuff on to the VI. If this happens I will be ecstatic. If it doesn’t I think my tantrums-per-day ratio will increase, but I’m bottom of the food chain in the company, so I will have to do what I’m told. Fingers crossed.

Cheers

Tim…

All change. Virtualization, here we come! was first posted on February 16, 2013 at 11:55 am.
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I mentioned in my previous post on this subject that I had 5 more objectives yet to cover. The articles for those objectives have now been added to the website.

• Routing IP Traffic on Linux
• Use iptables to Implement Packet Filtering and Configure Network Address Translation (NAT)
• Configure Linux to Authenticate Using Kerberos
• Build Simple Linux RPM Packages
• Linux iSCSI Targets and Initiators

That completes the set!

The articles for both exams are available here. I also have a page listing the objectives for both exams, with links to each of my articles that cover them.

• RHCSA Objectives
• RHCE Objectives

Now I just have to find the time to prepare for and sit the exams…

Cheers

Tim…

RHCE Certification Articles (continued)… was first posted on February 6, 2013 at 7:13 pm.
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After boring myself to tears watching The Hobbit, I lost my cinema mojo for a while. I’ve struggled to motivate myself to get involved. Tonight I decided to give Bullet to the Head a shot ( ouch ) at revitalizing my cinema spirit and you know something? It did it!

Stallone is a low grade hitman. His partner gets killed, so he accidentally teams up with a cop and goes on an ultra-violent killing spree of revenge.

The film plays to all Stallone’s strengths. He is doesn’t get involved in lengthy dialog. His lines are simple and direct, with a lot of attitude and a reasonable amount of humour. It’s a very basic action flick, but I think it delivers very well. If Stallone can keep delivering stuff like this, I’ll keep going to the cinema to see it.

On a mildly related note, I watched Dredd (2012) last night on cable at a mates house. It was pretty good. I should have seen it on the big screen.

Cheers

Tim…

Bullet to the Head… was first posted on February 2, 2013 at 11:13 pm.
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The recent ruling on the Oracle vs. HP case throws a lifeline to those customers already committed to Oracle on Itanium, like my current company, but what does this really mean as far as new customers are concerned?

Now this is just my opinion and you are free to disagree, but as far as I’m concerned, making the decision to go Oracle on Itanium is a massive mistake. In fact, it has been a mistake for the last 5+ years. During the death of Tru64, HP sales people were advising us to go HP-UX on Itanium and HP engineers were advising us to go Linux on x86-64, at approximately 1/10 of the cost. Who are you gonna believe? I’m sure there are workloads where Itanium used to work well, but from what I can see in my company, the regular Linux on x86-64 kit kicks the ass off the HP-UX on Itanium kit. When you consider the price difference between the two, that’s really the final straw…

I’ve now lived through the death of Oracle on Tru64 and I’m experiencing the slow death of Oracle on HP-UX. Forcing Oracle to support Itanium is all well and good, but it doesn’t make it a good choice for the future. Like Tru64, new versions and patches of Oracle products take ages to appear and the level of support for these platforms has always lagged far behind. I’ve heard plenty of people make the same complaints about Oracle on AIX, but I’ve got no recent experience of this, so it’s just hearsay.

When I’m asked my opinion, this is pretty much what I say:

• For any 3rd party product (that includes Oracle DB), always pick the platform the stuff is developed for. In this case, I would suggest that Oracle Database on OL/RHEL x86-64 is the natural choice. Pretty much everything else is a port from there. Solaris (SPARC) has some life, having been bought by Oracle, but that would still be further down the list for me, especially as the hardware is crazy expensive. Solaris on x86-64 is such a small user base I don’t even count it yet.
• The Oracle middleware products are Linux-only gear IMHO. Yes, they are supported on other platforms, but personally, I would not go near them. I’ve had a couple of bad experiences here and it’s just not worth it. Once again, new versions and patches come out quickest on OL/RHEL, so it’s a no-brainer for me.

To emphasize the first point, we recently initiated a project for a non-Oracle 3rd party product and were told it was supported on Linux or Windows. I asked the question, “What do most of your user base run on?” The answer that came back was Linux, so we went Linux. If they had said Windows, we would have gone Windows. Of course I have my preferences, but I don’t want to be anyones guinea pig where production applications are concerned!

When I arrived at my current company, the general strategy was Oracle DB on HP-UX and middleware products on RHEL. We will have some HP-UX kit for a few years to come, but Oracle databases for all new products are going on to Linux from now on. Most of those will probably be on VMware, since that is a strategic platform for our x86-64 installations. It looks pretty likely we will ditch RHEL in favour of Oracle Linux. Suits me just fine!

Cheers

Tim…

Note. The legalities of what Oracle did is not my concern in this post. The courts say they were in the wrong and they will have to pay for what they have done. My point is from the perspective of a user of Oracle products on this platform.

Oracle and Itanium… was first posted on February 2, 2013 at 1:13 pm.
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I was recently part of a 3-part podcast about the ACE program. You can listen to all 3 parts here:

• An inside look at the Oracle ACE program

Thanks to Bob Rhubart for the invite and to the other members of the panel (Vikki Lira, Alex Gorbachev and Debra Lilley).

Cheers

Tim…

 

An inside look at the Oracle ACE program was first posted on February 2, 2013 at 12:32 pm.
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