Re: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2016 19:13:53 +0100
Message-ID: <56BA2C61.40600_at_bluewin.ch>
True. People that would never dream of going to court without a lawyer will reject to consider an experienced partner when dealing with LMS.
On 09.02.2016 19:06, Seth Miller wrote:
> Michael,
>
> When dealing with police, the IRS or Oracle LMS, do not engage them
> directly. You need to have an advocate and a firewall. Urge your
> company to get a partner involved immediately (if they haven't
> already). Oracle LMS will tell you all kinds of stuff that isn't true
> or legally binding. Only an experienced partner will know what
> information should or should not be shared with them and will work
> with them to, at the very least, reduce the back fees Oracle will charge.
>
> Seth Miller
>
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 11:21 AM, Iggy Fernandez
> <iggy_fernandez_at_hotmail.com <mailto:iggy_fernandez_at_hotmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I found this article:
> https://jhdba.wordpress.com/2014/08/06/preventing-standby-databases-opening-in-active-dataguard-mode-chopt/
>
>
> The summary is that you did not make the change intentionally.
> Oracle did it without your asking, without your knowledge, and
> without warning you that it had made a change that would cause you
> to incur additional licensing charges.
>
> Iggy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2016 08:26:29 -0800
> Subject: Re: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard
> From: napacunningham_at_gmail.com <mailto:napacunningham_at_gmail.com>
> To: John.Hallas_at_morrisonsplc.co.uk
> <mailto:John.Hallas_at_morrisonsplc.co.uk>
> CC: dimensional.dba_at_comcast.net
> <mailto:dimensional.dba_at_comcast.net>; andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com
> <mailto:andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com>; oracle-l_at_freelists.org
> <mailto:oracle-l_at_freelists.org>
>
>
> Just wanted to reply with a Thank You to all. I appreciate all the
> great advice.
>
> I know I shouldn't take it personal, but it really does irritate
> me that Oracle seems to take the position of criminalizing their
> customer first. I really do try my best to stay within compliance
> as it is the responsible and respectable thing to do, but the
> respect sure does feel one sided when dealing with licensing. I'm
> just hoping that working with Oracle we can resolve this.
>
> Thanks again,
> Michael
>
> On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 11:00 PM, John Hallas
> <John.Hallas_at_morrisonsplc.co.uk
> <mailto:John.Hallas_at_morrisonsplc.co.uk>> wrote:
>
> What an excellent response Matthew. This is really helpful
> information for anyone responsible for ensuring that license
> compliance is adhered to.
>
> Thanks for taking the time to write it up and post to the list.
>
> John
>
> www.jhdba.wordpress.com <http://www.jhdba.wordpress.com>
>
> *From:*oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
> <mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org>
> [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
> <mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org>] *On Behalf Of
> *Dimensional DBA
> *Sent:* 09 February 2016 02:04
> *To:* napacunningham_at_gmail.com
> <mailto:napacunningham_at_gmail.com>; 'Andrew Kerber'
> *Cc:* 'oracle-l_at_freelists org'
> *Subject:* RE: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard
>
> Don’t answer this question to the list, but you need to think
> about why is a licenses audit being performed? Normally a
> license audit is only performed when it is believed you are in
> violation your licenses, such as turning on the OEM push back
> of data to Oracle Support for your databases, uploading files
> you provided during a recent SR, Talking to Oracle sales folks
> about what you are doing in your company including using
> products that they know are unlicensed, your company is in
> negotiation to reduce licensing cost or there is some other
> negotiation going on.
>
> For you, it would have been helpful to ask for the list’s
> support the moment your company was given notice that Oracle
> was demanding a license audit. We could have helped you in
> advance and eliminated the foreboding you are feeling .
>
> For now, you need to take a moment and breathe.
>
> Once a license audit has started things are out of your hands
> and normally in the hands of Chief Legal Counsel and the CFO
> (sometimes the CIO) of your company.
>
> Having done licenses audits when I worked for Oracle
> Consulting, companies I have worked for (second thing I do
> normally starting with a company) and now in my own
> consultancy, what is being looked for normally relates back to
> that question up above. It really depends on the skill of the
> Oracle consulting person sent as to what breadth your audit
> will take as there is no training course in Oracle Consulting
> on how to do a license audit and there is nothing in the
> contract that determines how a license audit will be performed
> from a technical basis.
>
> Some pointers during the license audit
>
> 1.Your technical personnel should not be talking to the
> auditor, including not going to lunch with them. Only a
> management level person normally part of the Legal or Finance
> team if not the Chief Legal Counsel or the CFO themselves, who
> will relate to the technical team what is needed from them for
> the audit to be performed.
> 2.Your team should only provide Oracle what is required. You
> do not have to fulfill all requests from Oracle as they
> normally overreach in their requests. Your upper management
> will help with that decision.
> 3.They should not have to have direct access to your servers
> if you provide a person to run the commands. Normally
> technical person is accompanied by lower management level
> person to ensure the conversation is only run this command and
> put output here, instead of the broader questions Oracle
> Consulting will want to ask.
>
> You can send me a private email and I can provide you with a
> list of things to check for in unconventional places to verify
> license compliance.
>
> As to your question of defense, having worked for a variety of
> Chief Legal Counsels, some of who were previous prosecutors,
> you again need to breathe.
>
> The defense can be impeded by the answer to the first
> question, but if your license snafu is a single database
> server and a human has made a mistake, the defense is simple
> and your Chief Legal Counsel will deal with it.
>
> If this is one of a variety of license violations then the
> defense gets more complicated, versus it is single error
> committed on a single server or across the whole fleet. Single
> error type versus multiple error types.
>
> I have worked with Oracle Sales on a variety of license
> issues, but normally I am telling them when an issue occurred
> instead of them finding something in a licenses audit. There
> are a variety of things that you can do to help your Chief
> Legal Counsel which includes gathering up your logging
> information listener.logs and alert.logs on your databases
> before they roll off and interpreting the data for them.
>
> Some examples of license violations I have encountered.
>
> 1.Those new server replacements had twice the cores as the
> previous servers and the DBA team and management was oblivious
> to that when the upgrades were done. This basically was a 32
> core addition that including EE Edition, RAC, Partitioning,
> ASO, Management packs etc. It took a couple of weeks to get
> back into license compliance.
> 2.A standby or primary server crashed and another server was
> pressed into service to maintain HA and the other server
> actually had a higher core count than the previous server.
> 3.Databases were flipped off of servers to new servers and the
> previous servers were never deprecated or used again, but the
> Oracle SW was still installed.
> 4.A set of test servers utilized production licensing for
> testing, then when the production servers were built, someone
> forgot to turn off the servers with still running databases in
> test.
> 5.A UNIX/Linux admin mistakenly put the deployment line in
> Chef/Puppet code and deployed Oracle SW to the fleet left
> there until I did a license audit.
> 6.A UNIX/Linux admin moved multiple physical servers to a VM
> Ware servers and spread the databases across the entire
> physical server fleet, which took 2 months to shuffle things
> around and condense the Oracle part of the fleet onto a
> smaller number of physical VM Ware hosts.
>
> *Matthew Parker*
>
> *Chief Technologist*
>
> *Dimensional DBA*
>
> *425-891-7934 (cell)*
>
> *D&B *047931344**
>
> *CAGE *7J5S7**
>
> *Dimensional.dba_at_comcast.net <mailto:Dimensional.dba_at_comcast.net>*
>
> *View Matthew Parker's profile on LinkedIn*
> <http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matthew-parker/6/51b/944/>
>
> *From:*oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
> <mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org>
> [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] *On Behalf Of *Michael
> Cunningham
> *Sent:* Monday, February 08, 2016 5:01 PM
> *To:* Andrew Kerber
> *Cc:* oracle-l_at_freelists org
> *Subject:* Re: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard
>
> Thanks Andrew.
>
> On Feb 8, 2016 4:42 PM, "Andrew Kerber"
> <andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com <mailto:andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Contact house of brick technologies. They have done quite a
> bit of work with oracle audit defense.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>
> On Feb 8, 2016, at 5:37 PM, Michael Cunningham
> <napacunningham_at_gmail.com <mailto:napacunningham_at_gmail.com>>
> wrote:
>
> Hello all, we have an Oracle audit going on and we are
> being told we are going to get charged for using Active
> Data Guard.
>
> Has anyone been successful in working with Oracle to have
> them realize these were unintentional and not deliberate?
>
> Technically the feature was enabled, but it was by
> accident and incorrect configuration of srvctl. As it
> happens, we had one standby database configured
> with db_startoption=open, and the other standby database
> with db_startoption=read only.
>
> The first was as a result of requiring a "failover" to
> physical standby and we missed setting the
> db_startoption=mount when we rebuilt the standby on the
> server that used to be primary.
>
> Each of the problems have been corrected, but Oracle is
> working on a bill and I'm looking for some advice from the
> group.
>
> --
>
> Michael Cunningham
>
>
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> --
> Michael Cunningham
>
>
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