Pythian Group

The Oracle OpenWorld 2010 conference is over and life is getting back to normal. However, this is a traditional time for the OOW after-parties and local meetings to discuss the results of the biggest annual event in Oracle space. Our Sydney Oracle Meetup is not an exception.

• Avi Miller: Linux and Open Source – 8th of October

  The first event in October is organized by Oracle Community in Sydney is “Linux, Virtualization and Cloud Computing with Oracle (OOW)”. If you are in  Sydney on the 8th of October you are more than welcome to join the event. I am happy to introduce Avi Miller who is long term Open Source and Linux evangelists in Australia. Currently, Avi is working as a Principal Consultant at Oracle and coming over to Sydney from Melbourne to present for the community. Please do not hesitate to pass this invitation to all IT staff in your organisation who may be interested (System Administrators, IT Managers, DBAs). I am sure many of you will enjoy the event.

• Tim Hall: Oracle PL/SQL expert – 18th of October
  Read the rest of this entry . . .

OpenSQLCamp is less than 4 months away, and I have finally gotten around to updating the site. Special thanks go to Bradley Kuzsmaul and the folks at Tokutek for getting the ball rolling and making the reservation at MIT. Using MIT means that we will have *free* reliable wireless guest access and projects.

OpenSQL Camp is a free unconference for people interested in open source databases (MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Drizzle), including non-relational databases, database alternatives like NoSQL stores, and database tools such as Gearman. We are not focusing on any one project, and hope to see representatives from a variety of open source database projects attend. As usual I am one of the main organizers of Open SQL Camp (in previous years, Baron Schwartz, Selena Deckelmann and Eric Day have been main organizers too; this year Bradley Kuzsmaul is the other main organizer). The target audience are users and developers, but others are encouraged to attend too. There will be both presentations and hackathons, with plenty of opportunities to learn, contribute, and collaborate!

I have updated the main Boston 2010 page at http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/Boston2010/ with travel and logistics information, including links to:
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good afternoon and welcome to issue 27. The number 27 according to numerology is “the symbol of the divine light” so I’ll try to do that ideal justice. We’re off to a good start, what with me actually getting this out on schedule and such, so let’s get to it while the day is still quiet.

Operating Systems

It’s been two weeks since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. I’m still loving it. If you are on the fence or just curious, Ryan Paul at Ars has an intensive 9 page review of the release. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hi there and welcome to Blogrotate in which I, your humble host and blogger, bring to you interesting stories and events from the past week in the SysAdmin world. It’s been yet another busy week, which is why this is coming out on a Sunday again, so I am going to have to short list this edition but there’s still plenty of tasty nuggets to be found. Read on.

Operating Systems

It’s been discovered that Microsoft released three patches last month without including them in the release notes. Two of the patches were to fix security holes in MS Exchange servers. While this is nothing new it completely removes the ability for a sysadmin to evaluate the impact of the patches on critical corporate systems, which is necessary before rolling out the updates. Not to mention it makes it really difficult to diagnose a change in behaviour if you have no idea there was a change made. See more gory details in Security firm reveals Microsoft’s ‘silent’ patches.

Sun/Oracle removed public firmware downloads is a strange piece by someone called techbert describing how he logged into the sunsolve to download some firmware for his systems only to find that they were no longer publicly available. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good evening and welcome to this weeks edition of Blogrotate. It’s a bit later than usual this week due to client concerns but I could not let this week go by without something. This week, after all, is the release of Ubuntu 10.04LTS (Lucid Lynx) so I get to leverage my supreme blogging power to promote the product since I use it pretty much everywhere now.

Operating Systems

So as I was saying, the release of Lucid Lynx has the world abuzz. We had a mini install fest here in the SA cluster at Pythian and 2/3 of it went well. It seems that video is the main source of install pain for us in this new version. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. Though I have been contributing to Blogrotate since its inception, this is the first time I have had the honour of posting it myself. Go me!

Operating Systems

Red Hat has announced the availability of a public beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). There are a number of changes, for which Dave Courbanou at The VAR Guy does a pretty good job of providing an overview. Read the rest of this entry . . .

I have successfully compiled and installed DBD::Oracle on Windows 2008 Server 64bit operating system today.

I used the latest version of DBD::Oracle 1.24, version 11.2.0.1.0 for 64bit Windows of Oracle’s
Instant Client Package – Basic along with the Instant Client Package – SQL*Plus and finally the Instant Client Package – SDK.

To get it to make and compile correctly I had to download Microsoft’s Visual Studio Ultimate

which should contain all the files you need. It is rather portly at 2+gb so you might want to grab lunch while you are downloading it.

After all the above downloading DBD::Oracle installed right out of the box.

All one has to do is select ‘Start Menu->All Programs->Microsoft Visual Studio 2010->Visual Studio Tools->Visual Studio x64 Win64 Command Prompt (2010)’
which will open a good old ‘dos’ window.

At this point CD to the directory where you downloaded DBD::Oracle

     c:\DBD-Oracle

then set your ‘ORACLE_HOME to the Instant Client directory

     c:\DBD-Oracle set ORACLE_HOME=c:\IC_11

you should also set your NLS like this

     c:\DBD-Oracle set NLS_LANG=.WE8ISO8859P15

Once the above setting are done do a

     c:\DBD-Oracle perl Makefile.PL

and then a

     c:\DBD-Oracle nmake install

Which will produce a whole of warnings (these you can ignore, as they do not seem to effect DBD::Oracle at all) and near the end it should output something like this;

     Generating code
     Finished generating code
     if exist blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll.manifest mt -nologo -manifest blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll.manifest -outputresource:blib\arch\auto
\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll;2
     if exist blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll.manifest del blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll.manifest
     C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe -MExtUtils::Command -e "chmod" -- 755 blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll
     C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe -MExtUtils::Command -e "cp" -- Oracle.bs blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.bs
     C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe -MExtUtils::Command -e "chmod" -- 644 blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.bs
     C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe "-Iblib\arch" "-Iblib\lib" ora_explain.PL ora_explain
Extracted ora_explain from ora_explain.PL with variable substitutions.
     C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe -MExtUtils::Command -e "cp" -- ora_explain blib\script\ora_explain
        pl2bat.bat blib\script\ora_explain

At this point you are all done.

Well almost.

It is important that you test your code before you install but you will have to set a few things up first to get it to fully test correctly.

You will need a TNSNAMES.ORA file that points to a valid DB in the Instant Client Directory

Next you will need to set the ORACLE_USER_ID to a valid user

     c:\DBD-Oracle set ORACLE_USER_ID=system/system@XE

You will have to set up TNS_ADMIN to point to the Instant Client Directory

     c:\DBD-Oracle set TNS_ADMIN=c:\IC_11

Most importantly you will have to add the Instant Client directory to your path like this

     c:\DBD-Oracle path = c:\IC_11;%path%

If you do not do this step you will run into the dreaded

Can’t load ‘C:/Perl/lib/auto/DBD/Oracle/Oracle.dll’ for module DBD::Oracle: load_file:%1 is not a valid Win32 application at C:/Perl/lib/DynaLoader.pm line 202.

Error later on after the compile when you try to use DBD::Oracle.

What is actually going on is that Perl cannot find oci.dll (or one of the other .dlls it needs to run) the

C:/Perl/lib/auto/DBD/Oracle/Oracle.dll’ and the DynaLoader error

is just a false trail as perl is very limited in what it Windows errors it can report on. For more complet info on this sort of error check out this page;

Oracle Troubleshooter HOWTO

by Alexander Foken. It is rather dated but the facts of why perl did not find a dll are still valid.

now you can do this

     c:\DBD-Oracle nmake test

and all the tests should run and it will report.

Finally simply do a

     c:\DBD-Oracle nmake install

and you are all set.

That is about it.

At this point you might want to add the Instant Client directory permanently to your path so you will not run into the Dynaloader error again.

As well you do not need to keep Visual Studio around to use DBD::Oracle so you can uninstall that as well.

Good morning everyone and welcome to another edition of all the news fit to reprint. Last week iPad news was the number one topic on the hearts and minds of most places I visit, let’s see if the iPad can last another week or if a new champion will be crowned. Call or text your votes to … oh wait that’s someone else. :)

Operating Systems

Starting off on a sad note that I missed last week. Ed Roberts, the inventor of the Altair personal computer died on April 2nd at the age of 68. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. This week has been absolutely insane so it’ll be another short one I’m afraid. Luckily for me the majority of news outlets were binging on iPad related press which left only limited space for real news.

Mobile

Yes normally I do not cover mobile stuff very much, yet even after the above crack about iPads I feel obligated to at least make mention of it. I, personally, do not care about iPads. Wake me when they have those little scrolly deals from Earth: Final Conflict. For those of you who do care, here’s a quick list of places you could go.

• Ars Technica reviews the iPad
• iPad Review by SlashDot’s very own CmdrTaco.
• And last but certainly most amusing iPad jailbroken already, using leftover security flaw

And how is the competition doing? Check out BlackBerry sees iPhone shrink in rear view mirror.

Distro Watch

There was not a lot of news on the OS front this week, but here’s a short list of the few OS coming to a device near you.

• Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 2 available. I’ve been using Lucid since it was pre-alpha and so far so good. Also among the hubub of Lucid, see Ubuntu 10.04 drops Yahoo search as default.
• Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring Beta 1 released. I’ve not used Mandriva since it was Mandrake, but it looks pretty nice. I’ll have to load it up someday.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 was released last week. CentOS 5.5 cannot be far behind.

Security

There’s a new exploit out against Java which has been proven to have the ability to launch apps on the desktop without authorization. Java exploit launches local Windows applications has the full story.

Here’s the list of what’s in store for the next “Patch Tuesday” release from MS. Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2010: 11 bulletins.

Data Centers

Have you ever wondered how a data center protects itself against the damaging effects of an earthquake? Check out Earthquakes and Data Centers over at Data Center Knowledge for an interesting read.

Are you looking for a PCI compliant data center? Check out PCI Compliance: Who Manages What? which gives good insight into the processes and highlights some things you should be looking for when you talk to the sales rep.

Hardware

Were you the first on your block to run out and get an Intel i7? Well now AMD throws even more cores at you. Check out New server platform and 12-core Opteron keep AMD in the game.

The clock tells me it’s time I should be going. I am sure I missed lots of good stuff this week, so feel free to add it to comments. You know you want to.

Stay tuned, the return of tOra is at hand. I’ve successfully compiled tOra on Lucid and have the instructions to prove it.

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz. I wonder where them birdies is. Welcome to Blogrotate. It’s Good Friday here in Ottawa, a holiday for us. For this reason it’s going to be a short one this week. That and the fact that it’s 25C and sunny here. :)

Operating Systems

Closure sweet closure. It’s been 7 years but SCO has finally lost it’s silly lawsuit against Novell. Novell smugly posted the results on their site with Decision in the SCO Group vs. Novell Jury trial. For us linux users they state for the record Read the rest of this entry . . .