Pythian Group

Good afternoon sports fans. I’ve had a couple of requests to update my world famous blog on installing TOra. Frankly I have been wanting to get this out for a while but duties other than blogging have taken precedence. That and I think my blogging ran out of entropy and needed some other IO to get going again. Well it’s now time for you all to let out that breath you have been holding since the ‘perfect 10′ was released (on 10.10.10 no less).
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Once again into the breach. The release of Ubuntu 10.04 is at hand. I’ve been playing with “Lucid” for a couple of months now but since we’re in beta2 with the release candidate soon to follow, I thought I would really sit down and get my normal app stack working including TOra. All in all the instructions are mostly the same as last time around, with a couple of new improvements, caveats and quid pro quo.
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Good morning folks and welcome to chapter 3 in the ongoing saga of TOra and Oracle support for Ubuntu. In this edition we’re faced with a new Ubuntu, new TOra 2.0, and new and exciting adventures, all of which I have stripped out so you can get this up and running quickly.

All in all, the build process turned out to be simpler than it had on previous versions all thanks to a much smarter build system. The scripts that debian-ize the packages are much more robust and also much more complex at first glance. There was no configure line to change in this one, it’s smart enough to pick up all the elements you need provided they are where the build expects them to be. One such item is the Oracle include path, which I will say more about shortly. Enough snappy patter, let’s get on with . . . 

Installing TOra with Oracle support on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

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I just filed a very annoying bug when trying to compile with plugin engines using the 5.1.xx source tarball.

Description

I am trying to test SphinxSE as a plugin instead of getting it statically linked and came across an annoying bug. When using the configure --with-plugins option only once, the engine is statically linked. When using it twice, the first engine is created as a plugin, and the 2nd one is linked statically. Here are a couple of examples:
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Hardware

My Dell desktop:

[root@erp RPMs]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz
cpu MHz         : 2793.022
cache size      : 512 KB

[root@erp RPMs]# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:      2073404 kB
...

Operating System

Download Centos Linux, and install the Linux operating system.

Kernel Version

Download kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL.i686.rpm and apply with:

$ rpm -ivh  kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL.i686.rpm 

The kernel should look like this:

root@erp RPMs]# uname -a
Linux erp.itskills.com 2.6.9-42.0.3.ELsmp #1 SMP Thu Oct 5 15:04:03 CDT 2006 i686 i686
i386 GNU/Linux

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Hi folks. I am back for the second in what will eventually be a long line of infrequent updates. Did you miss me?

End of School with Linux

OCLUG (The Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group) is putting on an event called—you guessed it—End of School with Linux. This is happening on April 28, 2009 starting at 11am at the University of Ottawa in the SITE building, room C0136. The purpose of the event is to help people with their Linux systems, install Linux, fix issues, and just generally help out in the community. Your humble blogger will be there, manning the booth from 1200-1600, so come on down. And tell a friend, too.

More details can be found at the CSSA’s page. Click here for a map of the campus.

Also check out the OCLUG home page.

Ubuntu 9.04 Released

Ubuntu 9.04 was released today. I have not yet looked at any reviews of the release candidates, but I am on my way out to pick up some new hardware on which to install it tonight.

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In Part 1 of this series, we prepared our Windows Server 2008 servers to be a part of a cluster. Part 2 showed us how we can add the shared disks, install the Failover Cluster Feature, and run the Validate Cluster Configuration Wizard. In this post, we will complete the process by creating a Windows Server 2008 cluster.

Creating the Windows Server 2008 cluster

Once you have managed to install the Failover Cluster Feature on both nodes, you can run the Failover Cluster Management console on either of the nodes. To do so:

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In Part 1 of this series, we prepared our Windows Server 2008 servers to be a part of a cluster. In this part, we will look at adding the iSCSI disks to the servers. The series of steps outlined below should be done on both nodes.

Before we go any further, I must mention that you should have at least two network cards configured on both of the servers, where one NIC is connected to the local area network, and the other to the other server and is private. This second NIC will be considered your heartbeat, where communication between nodes will travel. This is basic when configuring any cluster nodes. How these cards are configured will come into the picture as we go along in the process.

1. Add the iSCSI Targets as disks on the server nodes

Windows Server 2008 comes with iSCSI Initiator software that enables connection of a Windows host to an external iSCSI storage array using network adapters. This differs from previous versions of Microsoft Windows where you need to download and install this software prior to connecting to an iSCSI storage. You can launch the tool from Administrative Tools and select iSCSI Initiator.

To connect to the iSCSI target: Read the rest of this entry . . .

This happens to be my very first blog post with Pythian, and to kick this thing off, I would like to talk about building a Windows Server 2008 cluster.

As DBAs, we cannot separate ourselves from the grueling task of having to deal with the underlying operating system, especially as new versions come out. Running SQL Server also means understanding the operating system on which it runs. And since Windows Server 2008 has been released for almost a year now, a lot of customers are upgrading from Windows Server 2003 to this new version.

Installing SQL Server on a stand-alone server or member server in the domain is pretty straightforward. Dealing with clustering is a totally different story. The goal of this series of posts is to be able to help DBAs who may be charged with installing SQL Server on a Windows Server 2008 cluster.

The best approach is to always have an environment on which to run these tests. In my case, I run VMware Workstation 6.5 on my Windows XP laptop. Here are the steps that you need to take.

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The situation is this. I am a system administrator working in a world of DBAs. This is not a bad thing, but sometimes tasks crossover and I need to connect to Oracle. In light of this, I have been using the Oracle SQL Developer GUI in KDE for some time now.

While the functionality of the product is quite slick I find it painful to work with. The major source of my pain is the slow interface due to its dependence on Java. I mean seriously, the screen refreshes are abysmal. I found that the more I used it, the more I needed a lighter, faster alternative.

One day a while back, I noticed that the boss was running TOra. He’s more of a DBA than I am, and I tend to trust his opinion on such things, so I asked him about it. He told me it was quite good, and so I decided I should try it out. I installed it on my Kubuntu desktop, fired it up, and much to my chagrin, found that it had no Oracle support. A bit of digging turned up that Oracle support was not included in the Debian package.

I had to do something about it. A bit more research brought me to some useful sites, a couple of which I will reference later, but after going through the process, I found that none of them had all the bits together in one nifty package. This is an attempt to change that.

After bouncing back and forth on some of these steps, fixing environment issues, decoding compiler errors, and generally fiddling, I went back to my notes and terminal histories and figured out what I feel is the best order for the process. This is the streamlined version of maybe two hours of fiddling. I hope it will help someone avoid the pitfalls (there are 8-bit crocodiles below!).

And so I humbly present to you . . . 

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