Monday, October 8, 2012

11g Interactive App


Remember back in the day when you could actually know all the V$ and DBA views! That day is long gone but you can at least find what you need by using the Oracle 11g Interactive app. Look as you may, you will not fine the V$ dynamic performance views. Maybe the project budget ran out and they were not included. Nonetheless, this is a great app.

Use this link to see the app at my website.
Use this link to down load the app for yourself.

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Minnesota Dreaming






Up at Lake Vermillion near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, having a Furious good time.

Minnesota's Surly Brewery is on its way to being one of the best.

This post is the Minnesota equivalent to a Corona ad.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Setting up NFS on EC2

When you get to the point of having a little virtual server farm it is handy to have a place to put common files. In the case of an Oracle DBA we've historically used an NFS mount point to accomplish that. Maybe in today's ever increasing security conscious world there may be a better way then using NFS, but that also may translate into more complexity too.

The NFS setup is fairly simple on EC2 EBS storage. In the case of this example AMI ami-e565ba8c (Amazon t.mirco Linux) image was used as the server, and ami-42778a2b (Oracle Linux aka Red Hat) was used as the client.

1) Insure that nfs utils and rpcbind are instgalled. When doing yum update if you get an on rpcbind, then use 'portmap' instead.

    yum install nfs-utils rpcbind

2) On the server that is going to be the source of the shared storage edit the export file to add the shared directory.

    vi /etc/exports
   
Add the following parameters to the file : your directory path, your public (EIP) address and the options to control access such as read/write options, security, and asychronous options. The EIP is of the client. The file format is reported to be very sensitive. Notice that there is no space after the EIP and before the options as you might exepect there to be. Use only the 'space' character between parameters. There are a lot of options for security and other things. Look up the doc on NFS and the exports file for more detail.

     /yourDIRname ec2-xxx-xx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com(rw,async)

3) Now start the services.

    service rpcbind start   (if rpcbind is not available then use ‘portmap’)
    service nfs start
    service nfslock start

4) Next load the changes. You can add more mount points latter and repeat the export step.

    exportfs –ar

5) Insure that the services are up on the client. If they do not exist, then do the yum update step.

6) Create the nfs mount point on the client. The permissions on the server and the client shared storeage should be open enough to permit the nfs mount, otherwise you will receive a 'permission denied' message. For testing purposes I opened mine to 777. If you receive permission errors also try opening permissions on the parent directory of the mount point.

7) Open permissions on the server's AWS Security Group to allow the NFS mount. In the excellent blog post by Hunter Ford he set the group as follows. For example, for UDP he opened ports 111, and 32806.

    TCP: 111, 2049
    UDP: 111, 32806

However, you will also see in other posts that other ports were opened, and there are some notes stating the the port number used by the NFS process changes during server bounces. I have not confirmed any of this myself. For testing purposes just open TCP and UDP to all ports. Then after testing tighten it down to the desired level. If you get a 'time out, retrying' message then it is probably a security group issue, or, a configuration issue with your exports file.

9) Do the manual mount. The EIP is the NFS server's EIP. I've seen on other systems that the mount can't occur if you have a user sitting within the to-be mounted path. Insure that that you CD out of the shared area.

    mount -t nfs ec2-xxx-xx-xxx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/var/www/test /var/www/test

8) To make the changes permanent you will need to update the /etc/fstab file and add the services to your server startup.

    chkconfig --level 2345 rpcbind on
    chkconfig --level 2345 nfs on
    chkconfig --level 2345 nfslock on

    ec2-xxx-xx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/var/www/test    /var/www/test  nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr 0 0


Monday, September 17, 2012

Oracle - Avengers Poster

    



I have these posters which will become collector's items long after you are probably dea.... well, no longer collecting.

Posters are 2x3 foot. The mailing tube alone will be $5. If you want one send me $20 for shipping and handling to my paypal account at jim@jimbolesdesigns.com.

Friday, August 31, 2012

Hiatus is Over

I have not posted for several months because I got carried away with the idea of not only doing OEM 12c on Amazon's Cloud, but also to do that as a business model. That is, implement OEM 12c on a public or private cloud as a managed service. There is a LOT to consider beyond the technical. I don't have an MBA so it took some time to think through all the business considerations, and then had the outline looked over by others who do have a business background.

I ended up writing a white paper and 30 page business outline on what I called Business Transaction Assurance (BTA). In short, BTA is simply the implementation of OEM 12c and all the associated packs, plug-ins, etc. However, all of the features are broken into levels of assurance from the very basic (e.g. OS and database monitoring) to the advance levels using RUEI, synthetic transactions, etc. for the purpose of instrumenting business transactions end-to-end. A customer could buy into the level of BTA that is needed.

There are several conceptual weaknesses in the outline which will require some reworking of the business plan, but the overall concepts are sound enough for presentation. One of the main weaknesses is that I'm not sure how applicable an Oracle-centric management and monitoring solution is to small businesses who operate on a shoestring. I tried to think in terms of multitenancy to reduce costs. And it might work in some regards, but as you know OEM is not designed to be a multitenant application. It would only be a work around and would take a full proof of concept project to determine to what degree it would or wouldn't work, and then determining if targeting small businesses makes sense at all.

I will be talking with several established Oracle Partners in the next few weeks to determine their interest in offering OEM 12c as a managed service. It takes a lot to start a new practice, and becoming a certified Oracle Partner for a specialty like OEM is only one step. 

You can pick up a copy of the business outline here.

Please feel free to send me your comments at jim@jimbolesdesigns.com

Monday, May 14, 2012

Oracle Cloud Control 12c on Amazon Web Services

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c can run on Amazon's cloud services if you know a few tricks. You can download a copy of the how-to guide at OEMonEC2partTwo.pdf. It is in draft form. Over the next few weeks a bit more will be outlined before I move onto part three of this series. You can obtain part one here.

The highlights of  Part Two are:

  • Brief over of  features and architecture OEM CC 12c.
  • Extensive links to Part One of the series and other sources of necessary information to run an Oracle database repository (OMR) in an AWS EC2 environment.
  • Set up of the Amazon Machine Image to satisfy CC prerequisites.
  • Extensive discussion of  Name Resolution to enable CC to run in a DHCP environment.
  • Scripts for dynamic Hosts file management.
  • Firewall configuration to enable the CC architectural pieces to communicate in an EC2 context.
  • Debugging tips if the installation goes not as planned.
  • How to configure CC security credentials.

 If anyone how has already done this, or, will use this guide to do so I'd like to hear from you.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

DB Startup Fails on WORKAREA_SIZE_POLICY

A short posting just as an FYI in case you hit this Oracle startup error. I couldn't find any web post or MOS post covering this error so maybe this will help some one else hitting this nuance error.

When using the init parameters MEMORY_MAX_TARGET and/or MEMORY_TARGET you may get and error on startup the these are incompatible with WORKAREA_SIZE_POLICY. If this occurs simply unset that policy parameter. On startup it will then be set to the default value of AUTO which is the most common value. Setting it to MANUAL does not work.

That was my experience.
Just an FYI.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Security On Top Of Security

Regretfully, we have to put up with security invading our life maybe more than any danger that might occur.  This is true in our personal as well as public life. Recently I spent the day pulling my hair out because I couldn't achieve a very novice accomplishment like turning apache on and accessing a web page. More specifically, port 80 was not accessible while ping and ssh worked... well of course, they are on different ports.

In AWS EC2 parlance the Security Group must allow port 80 to be open.... and it was. I looked at it 10 times over 12 hours doubling checking again and again. It wasn't a mistake at on the apache-level, EC2-configuration, Selinux, iptable conflicts, host files, OS file or group permissions, file ownership, httpd.conf file, unavailable ports, the setroubleshoot service, or anything I could find on the EC2 forum.

It was just a firewall, a second frigging firewall... can you believe it. The Red Hat firewall is set up for you by default. My focus was on the EC2 firewall not knowing that RH already has one running by default. In my case I was using Oracle's Linux, but you always have to remember that it is a RH derivative.

What's my excuse for not knowing this?.... In the parlance of Dr. McCoy... "Damn it Jim, I'm a DBA not a RH nerd."

And I'll be damned if I'm going to make changes to the iptables... port by port, even when I did see a web comment or two in that direction. The syntax is totally greek even for a geek!

Actually, it is quite easy to turn off the RH firewall without making changes to the iptables. The last command supposedly does a permanent disable.

# service iptables save
# service iptables stop
# chkconfig iptables off


But that's not all... oh no, it isn't that simple. After another hour of frustration I needed a dope slap and good. Not because I'm a dope, but because I needed to wake up from 10 hours of security hell frying my brain. The final solution was to turn off IPV4 and IPV6.

# service ip6tables save
# service ip6tables stop
# chkconfig ip6tables off


Am I going to turn the RH firewall back on? What do you think.



Sunday, April 22, 2012

11.2.0.3.2 GI PSU 2 on ASM Based Standalone DB

Applying the GI PSU 2 on a vanilla database is fairly easy. However, patching a standalone database in an Oracle Restart and ASM configuration, which uses Role Separation, and running OPatch in auto mode is a little more challenging. At some point the OPatch auto mode will be clear sailing, but given this configuration there were bumps in the road.

The notes provided in the following link may save you from a sleepless night if your database does not come up after applying the patch.

Good luck, and let me know if you have comments.

GI PSU 2 Apply



Monday, April 16, 2012

MOS HTML version instead of Flash

Initially the Flash version of My Oracle Support (MOS) was disliked by many. I got use to it and it has improved over time. At times though it would be nice to still have an HTML version. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there is an HTML version. The URL is http://supporthtml.oracle.com

Monday, April 9, 2012

Highlights of the Installation and Configuration Companion

The Installation and Configuration Companion contains the following topics

•    Quick Start Guides for concise list of steps with links to in depth references.
•    How to obtain access to Oracle Support at a very low cost
•    How to make an EC2 IP/EIP persistant thru server stop/starts
•    How to validate an Amazon Machine Image for an Oracle database
•    How to use YUM during the installation
•    How to create your own server init/rc startup script
•    How to set up ssh, VNC, firewall tunneling and how to solve problems when connecting to your server
•    How to install the Grid Infrastructure (GI) using role separation for security and compliance
•    How to allocate EC2 storage for a production sized OEM repository server, including setting up swap, temp, and an Oracle Fast Recovery Area
•    How to configure Oracle's ASM with GI troubleshooting techniques
•    How to troubleshoot a failed installation and how to start over
•    Bug fixes for: Oracle supplied AMI, Oracle install process, and a fix for ElasticFox enabling it to run in new versions of Firefox
•    How to test a recovery on the EC2 storage and Oracle database levels

An overview of the following important topics

•    EC2 security/firewall setup
•    EC2 storage
•    Setting up EC2 command line tools
•    Extensive list of important ASM and EC2 topics
•    Brief outline of the GI services
•    Brief outline of GI role separation
•    An FDISK primer

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Oracle Grid Infrastructure on Amazon's Web Services

The primary goal of this series of papers will be to document the process of installing, configuring and fine tuning an implementation of the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) 12c Cloud Control product suite on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Follow-on papers will cover in-depth utilization of the rich feature sets of both AWS and OEM.

The intended audience is individuals with at least some familiarity of these technologies, and who desire more in-depth coverage than that given in a cursory installation tutorial.

This series serves as a bridge between the thousands of pages of excellent but daunting official documentation, and the cursory installation tutorials which hide detail and provide a false sense of completion. The series should be used as a companion to the full installation guides. It will fill in details, show examples, explain pitfalls, and in some cases document items missing from other sources.

Some of the highlights are:
  • Quick Start Guides serve as a guide to the overall text. These sections provide a step-by-step approach with references into the main text for further detail.
  • Hundreds of links to authorization sources to help you understand not only what to do but why.
  • Pointers for what to do when things go wrong with debugging tips.
  • Extensive coverage of setting up Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud for and Oracle database.
  • How to obtain access to Oracle's Knowledge Base and tools almost for free.
You can pull down a copy of  here.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Book Review of Frank Munz's Middleware & Cloud Computing




 If you want the lay-of-the-land of the cloud space, then Frank Munz’s sweeping volume is for you. As you would expect from a Ph.D. the expansive yet down-to-earth thesis begins with a definition of terms and builds to a comprehensive synopsis of cloud architecture. As you might expect from Oracle’s Technologist of the year there is a consistent focus on Oracle’s rich middleware technology stack, but does not lose sight of other key technologies such as Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, and of course database technologies. 






This volume is far from being an extended Oracle sales white paper. The majority of the writing covers what cloud is today.
·         It compares Rackspace to Amazon cloud offerings
·         The importance of SOA and how it is implemented in real terms without sales gibberish
·         An extensive coverage of middleware provisioning, domains, filesystems, deployment suggestions, availability and backup and recovery.
This is an architectural document. Don’t expect step by step how-to tutorials. I found it refreshing to see a relatively unbiased presentation coving Amazon’s, Racksapace’s, and Oracle’s technologies all in one volume. Important architectural topics such as capacity planning, system scaling, pricing, and load balancing and more are covered in adequate depth.

It is a book in my toolbox I know I’ll pull out just to see what Frank said on the topic.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Does beer need a special glass?

All work and no play makes Jim a dull boy. I took a break from my Oracle musings and had some fun drinking beer at the grocery store and ended up buying crystal.

Most of us know that certain alcoholic beverages should be served in certain shaped glasses. Everyone has heard of fluted glasses for champagne, brandy snifters, and glasses for red wine and others for white wine.

OK,  does it reaallly matter? Yes, I think so, but does it reaaallly matter for beer? I have to say I was skeptical. I've had wine in the right glass and I wasn't overly impressed. But then again I'm not a wine connoisseur, and more importantly there wasn't a 'control' to compare it to at the restaurant. Can you imagine pulling out your own glass and instructing the waiter to fill it so you can compare it to the wine poured in their glass!
Enter Hy-Vee, yes, Hy-Vee the grocery store. In my new neighborhood they have a Hy-Vee Club where you can register for cooking classes and this week beer tasting. Of course it is all about sales actually, but I did learn some things. The two sponsors were the local beer distributor and Spiegelau glass a German glass and crystal manufacturer.

So now the stage is set I'm thinking. Tell me how my beer will taste better in your glass and why I should be buying more different kinds of beer to go with these different glasses.

It was all pretty simple. They gave us the set of glass (in the picture above) and we tried multiple beer styles that are supposedly better in one or the other glass. I won't go into foamy details, but in fact the four beer styles did actually smell, look and taste better in the special glasses as compared to a standard Libby bar glass.

I'm a beer guy from way back. In fact, a running joke is that on the second or third date with my wife I said to the waiter "I'll want a pitcher of beer and give her whatever she wants". That's sooo sad, but so true in my college days. I have to say though, I was never really happy with the "king of beers" or any other beer typically found in bars back then.

Today we are living in an age of a beer renaissance. The brewing game and the players have  undergone a complete makeover. There is probably more varieties of beer in existence now than ever before in the history of ale brewing apes.

So, is it time for beer drinkers to rise to the level of wine devotees, and have our own specialty glasses?

After my Hy-Vee experience I have to weigh in on the side that it is worth a look if you think you have a somewhat trained beer palette. Don't get me wrong. If you don't like beer a fancy glass isn't going to win you over. But if you know one IPA from another or an oatmeal stout from an imperial stout, then maybe a change of hardware will tantalize your taste buds.

I'm not convinced yet that the shape of the glass matters for beer. It might. I just haven't done a 'controlled' taste test yet. What we did during the beer tasting event was to compare various crystal glasses to the standard Libby bar glass and I have to say, yes, there is a significant difference. Oh, boy... that's all I need is more reasons to drink beer!

So, how is that explained? The sales person said it was in the glass chemistry. He showed us a 20,000 power electron microscope slides of the Libby glass and the Spiegelau crystal. The crystal was completely smooth even at that ridiculous level of magnification, and the regular glass was a pitted and cratered landscape like the surface of the moon.

So what? Well, with all of those crevices over the complete surface of the glass two things occur. All the crevices hold things like soap, dirt and hard water calcium.  Additionally, they somehow 'steal' the carbonation from the liquid. We didn't get into the exact chemistry exchange of the glass-gunk-CO2 reaction, and I'm still a bit skeptical on that, but the proof is in the taste. The beer in crystal consistency looked, smelled and tasted better. The opinion of the 50 or so in the class was pretty much unanimous. Without any prompting or hard sell many of them left the class and went right on down to buy their glass.... opps I mean crystal.

As an aside, this CO2 issue is a beer thing regarding the importance of the proper release of carbonation. It does not play a part in wine, unless it is a carbonated wine. Regular wine glasses are more about shape only.

I was sold that the crystal was better just by pouring a pilsner (a generally mild and unimpressive beer in my book) and smelling it in both glasses. As you may know, the majority of our sense of taste comes from smell, and the beer in the crystal alway smelled fruitier, spicier, or just plain more aromatic. The beer in the Libby glass smelled like Budweiser in a plastic solo cup... or worse. Someone in the class mentioned something about kitty litter. No kidding. Beer in the Libby glass smelled like everything I don't like about beer.

How can that be?

Not sure, but if you are a beer type of person you should try it out. These glasses are not cheap. You can find them for around $10 each. Sam's Club has them as well as Overstock.com and other places. Shop around.  Ask your local Hy-Vee to hold a class. I got my set of 4 for $30 as a class special, and you get to try some great beer during the class as well as great hors d'oeuvres prepared by the Hy-Vee chef. I don't know what Hy-Vee's regular price is for the crystal, but I'm sure it is reasonable and they have a great selection of beer too.

Cheers!

I'll be posting phase one of my Oracle Enterprise Manager 12 Cloud Control project in the near future. Stayed tune... and have a beer in the right glass!

Monday, January 23, 2012

Amazon Web Services & The EC2 Support Team

It has been nearly a month of using the services provided by Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and I have to say that overall at this early stage I'm more than happy. I've been working with Oracle tools and support services for several decades and it really isn't fair to directly compare a relative upstart to a fairly mature company. Even with some rough edges I have gotten what I needed from the EC2 Support Team so far.

At this point I'm not paying for support, and the public forum style of free support is adequate for this stage of my project. I have seen several occurrences of dissatisfied customers, but Amazon has made attempts to rectify complaints, and fairly often the problems are caused by the customer's own lack of knowledge.

One area where I'm still not happy with is the fact that two Oracle provided virtual machine images (AMI) have a very serious bug. ami-42778a2b Oracle Linux 5.6 (without a database), and Oracle Linux 5.4 (without a database).

They both would become unreachable after using them for awhile. In the case of the 5.4 version if you attached an EBS volume, then bounced the server it would come up but you could not log on.

I asked several times that the AMIs be corrected or removed, or, in the least a warning posted and the support staff notified of the problem so as little time and effort as possible was lost. I received no confirmation that my suggestion was taken. However, I did notice that the 4.5 version may no longer be available.

The problem in both cases involved the Ethernet port/card eth0. The fix below was supplied by Amazon Support. Regretfully, you must do this to a brand new instance, because the damaged instance is not reachable to fix.

Remove the complete HWADDR-line from /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:

> cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
> mv ifcfg-eth0 backup_ifcfg-eth0
> cat backup_ifcfg-eth0 | grep --invert-match HWADDR > ifcfg-eth0

Remove the complete class: NETWORK from /etc/sysconfig/hwconf with e.g. vi. I deleted the following lines:

-
class: NETWORK
bus: PCI
detached: 0
device: eth0
driver: pcnet32
desc: "Advanced Micro Devices AMD 79c970 PCnet32 LANCE"
network.hwaddr: 00:0C:29:FA:B6:CB
vendorId: 1022
deviceId: 2000
subVendorId: 1022
subDeviceId: 2000
pciType: 1
pcidom: 0
pcibus: 0
pcidev: 10
pcifn: 0

I have seen notes that you can shutdown a damaged instance, detach the root volume, attach it to a new instance, bring up that instance and repair the damageed root volume, then subsequently reattach it to what was the damaged instance.

Anyway... it was great that Amazon Support was willing to work on this problem. They were probably within their rights to refuse to touch the issue, because it was not their AMI. Oracle and Amazon (for now) are cloud partners and it would have been a very disheartening warning sign if Amazon did refuse to work on this issue.

At approximately $100 a month to have a development environment to experiment on is more than a bargain, and have some level of support on top of that is a winning situation.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

MAAS Project Definition

Monitoring As A Service
Oracle 12C Cloud Control on Amazon’s EC2 web services

Project Goals
1.      Personal educational environment for the suite of Amazon Web Service (AWS) tools
2.      Personal educational environment for 12c Could Control
3.      Proof of concept for a marketable cloud based monitoring system – Monitoring As A Service (MAAS)

Project Phases
1.      Initial Installation, Configuration & Discovery
2.      Detailed Feature Exploration & Feature-Level Testing
3.      System and Architectural Tuning
4.      Cost Analysis & Business Case Evaluation
5.      Automation & Packaging

Project Synopsis
Installation, Configuration & Discovery – This phase will iterate through several installs and reconfigures until a stable and functionally complete environment it built for Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) on AWS. Because the total feature set is very extensive this phase will be ongoing for several months and will merge into phase two.

Detailed Feature Exploration & Testing – This phase will focus on exploration, building, and testing of features deemed necessary for a production OEM system. Features will be tested for stability and robustness, and also on the ease of support and cost effectiveness on the AWS architecture. This phase will run from 2 to six months

System and Architectural Tuning – The results of phases one and two will provide the background to build, test, and tune the MAAS architectural design. The design will adhere to Oracle’s Maximum Availability Architecture, AWS’s architecture best practices and OEM configuration standards. The final system must be stable, cost effective, and offer flexible service offerings through OEM. This phase will run 3 months.

Cost Analysis & Business Case Evaluation – OEM has a very extensive level of system, application, and business-level services. These services delivered via MAAS must be at a substantial cost reduction. This phase will focus on packaging these services into Service Level Agreements (SLA). Each SLA will have associated business requirement, cost, metric, review and report, and where applicable thresholds, response, and actions. This phase will run 2 months.

Automation & Packaging – Cost effectiveness is the primary goal of the project. OEM must be configured for automation of tasks at every opportunity.  Cost will rise significantly where automation is not ‘out of the box’ or has to be developed and refined over time. OEM and the overall Oracle and AWS architecture must be designed to be as ‘lights out’ as possible. The end result will be an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) which contains a deployable MAAS infrastructure. The AMI can be quickly installed for each new business customer and subsequently customized through the SLA creation process. This phase will run three months.