Pythian Group

A common scenario in the life of a DBA on a linux server looks something like this:

From: Sue-the-sysadamin
To:the-dba
Date: 2011-10-28 17:54:34

Dear DBA,

We will be patching the linux systems this Friday night, October 28th at 21:00.
The list of patches is attached.

Let us know if there are any conflicts with Oracle.
BTW, we need to know by 14:00 tomorrow.

Sue

Yikes! The SysAdmin wants to apply these patches this week, and needs to know if there are any conflicts this afternoon.

So you open up the list of patches. When you see the lengthy list of patches you suddenly realize the long lunch you had planned with your sweetheart is going to be rescheduled.

I recently received several lists of patches that were to be applied to a number of different linux servers that were all running oracle, which led to this blog entry.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Or how to have an answer other than “I don’t know” when asked “How long does that take?”.

Recently while working on a client site I discovered that it takes 30-90 seconds to make an ssh connection to one of the servers. Connections between servers for this client typically take < 1 second, so the lengthy connection time was definitely out of order.

If you are familiar with debugging ssh connections you are probably familiar with the ‘-v’ option that directs ssh to output verbose comments stating which operation is currently taking place.  You can add up to three -v options on the command line, increasing the verbosity with each one.  An example follows: Read the rest of this entry . . .