Raw devices de-support
From: Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:26:21 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <pan.2011.11.18.20.26.20_at_gmail.com>
I was recently engaged in an effort to get my home RAC up and running. My hardware isn't all that great, it's a desktop with 4GB RAM and plenty of (local) disk space. I am running Fedora because, in addition to being a database and web server, this is also my entertainment center, with my entire CD collection on it.
The first idea was to try and run RAC locally on FC14. It was unsuccessful because of the OCFS2 problems. The software on F14 just wasn't working. I was finally successful with F15 which contains a working version of OCFS2. Now that this was done, I got ambitious and started thinking of ASM and that brought me to the topic from the title. There was a lot of excitement when Oracle decided to drop the support for raw devices entirely in 12g, but Fedora dropped it in version 10. It is not possible to create raw devices on any Fedora later than FC9. Also, ASMLib is not supported for any Fedora Core after FC6. In other words, ASM cannot be used on FC10 and later because ASM will not take normal block device. It reports "illegal disk type". The last Linux version on which I was able to create raw devices was RHEL 5.7, in its CentOS incarnation. The venerable /etc/sysconfig/rawdevices which has made things unnecessarily easy for the administrators is now gone. The Oracle's decision to de-support character raw devices was in fact a Linux decision. They're also experimenting with replacing /sbin/ init. In FC14 and Ubuntu, there is unfinished and undocumented POS called
"Upstart". FC15 and FC16 have something completely different called
"systemd", documented even less than "Upstart". Of course, they broke
away with chkconfig, so the old utilities like chkconfig now offer only limited functionality. Upstart is now in RHEL 6. You can all be looking forward to "and now something completely different", Linux style. Linux is, for some reason, trying to break away from the Unix compatibility in a major way. I am not really satisfied by the result. Linux is taking away control from the administrators, introducing the major new features without properly documenting them and removing the features that have been in use for a very long time. I don't even want to mention the new GNOME and Unity interfaces which I have both ditched in favor of Xfce. I have to confess being less and less satisfied with Linux. I am not so sure that open source is a good idea. Sufficient number of bozos can destroy even the good things. Nothing is safe from morons, not even the work of Ritchie, Thompson and Kernighan. Linux looks like a moronization of Unix.
I am not at all convinced that Oracle is doing a good thing by releasing their own distribution. Maybe they should have joined the BSD camp? It was probably a decision of financial nature, not a technical one.
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:26:21 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <pan.2011.11.18.20.26.20_at_gmail.com>
I was recently engaged in an effort to get my home RAC up and running. My hardware isn't all that great, it's a desktop with 4GB RAM and plenty of (local) disk space. I am running Fedora because, in addition to being a database and web server, this is also my entertainment center, with my entire CD collection on it.
The first idea was to try and run RAC locally on FC14. It was unsuccessful because of the OCFS2 problems. The software on F14 just wasn't working. I was finally successful with F15 which contains a working version of OCFS2. Now that this was done, I got ambitious and started thinking of ASM and that brought me to the topic from the title. There was a lot of excitement when Oracle decided to drop the support for raw devices entirely in 12g, but Fedora dropped it in version 10. It is not possible to create raw devices on any Fedora later than FC9. Also, ASMLib is not supported for any Fedora Core after FC6. In other words, ASM cannot be used on FC10 and later because ASM will not take normal block device. It reports "illegal disk type". The last Linux version on which I was able to create raw devices was RHEL 5.7, in its CentOS incarnation. The venerable /etc/sysconfig/rawdevices which has made things unnecessarily easy for the administrators is now gone. The Oracle's decision to de-support character raw devices was in fact a Linux decision. They're also experimenting with replacing /sbin/ init. In FC14 and Ubuntu, there is unfinished and undocumented POS called
"Upstart". FC15 and FC16 have something completely different called
"systemd", documented even less than "Upstart". Of course, they broke
away with chkconfig, so the old utilities like chkconfig now offer only limited functionality. Upstart is now in RHEL 6. You can all be looking forward to "and now something completely different", Linux style. Linux is, for some reason, trying to break away from the Unix compatibility in a major way. I am not really satisfied by the result. Linux is taking away control from the administrators, introducing the major new features without properly documenting them and removing the features that have been in use for a very long time. I don't even want to mention the new GNOME and Unity interfaces which I have both ditched in favor of Xfce. I have to confess being less and less satisfied with Linux. I am not so sure that open source is a good idea. Sufficient number of bozos can destroy even the good things. Nothing is safe from morons, not even the work of Ritchie, Thompson and Kernighan. Linux looks like a moronization of Unix.
I am not at all convinced that Oracle is doing a good thing by releasing their own distribution. Maybe they should have joined the BSD camp? It was probably a decision of financial nature, not a technical one.
-- http://mgogala.byethost5.comReceived on Fri Nov 18 2011 - 14:26:21 CST