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  • Signed on the dotted line-Enkitec!

    I had to think of ‏@OyvindIsene, a great ambassador of the Norwegian Oracle User Group when I typed the heading for this post. Unlike him I have not actively been looking for new challenges but sometimes things just develop, and in my case that was a great turn of events. I am very happy to have signed on…

  • Oracle Linux support in ESXi

    For quite some time now I am using ESXi 5 update 1 for my lab server and I’m very happy with it. In my lab environment I am not too picky what to run and do not worry about support too much. It’s not production! One area of concern has been the support for Oracle’s…

  • Adding disks to VMware Workstation 8 on the fly on RHEL 6

    Although this post is primarily written for users of VMware Workstation 8 it is applicable for any RedHat 6 clone and adding disks with single path on the fly. Multipathing requires additional setup in dm-multipath or the vendor multipathing software which I won’t cover here. A quick hint though: you need to set disk.EnableUUID =…

  • Lights-out management console on Supermicro boards

    So this is slightly off topic, as it doesn’t deal with anything directly related to Oracle, it’s more a reference to those who are using Supermicro boards like I do. The nice thing about professional hardware is that you do not need a keyboard or mouse, or even a monitor. The board I have comes…

  • Why ESXi 5 has become my new standard hypervisor

    OK so I have to admit that I was very sceptical at first about any non-paravirtualised hypervisors. Mainly because my knowledge about virtualisation seems to have become a little dated. I thought that anything that’s para-virtualised will clearly outrun anything else. Based on my experience with my older hardware this was actually true. However, a…

  • Get a feel for enterprise block level replication using drbd

    I didn’t really have a lot of exposure to block-level replication on the storage level before an engagement in the banking industry. I’m an Oracle DBA, and I always thought: why would I want to use anything but Oracle technology for replicating my data from one data centre to another? I need to be in…

  • How to set up data guard broker for RAC

    This is pretty much a note to myself on how to set up Data Guard broker for RAC 11.2.0.2+. UPDATE: Please note that a lot of this has changed in 12.1, as described in a different blog post of mine (Little things worth knowing: Data Guard Broker Setup changes in 12c). If you are looking for…

  • Little things worth knowing-static and dynamic listener registration

    As part of  a recent project to remove a vulnerability in relation to CVE-2012-1675 it became apparent that there are certain misconceptions around dynamic and static listener registration which are hard to get rid of. The below is applicable for single instance Oracle only! Now let’s start with a quiz: what does the following output…

  • How to use vi-style editing in SQL*Plus

    This post is nothing new, and I created it after a little discussion on twitter about how to use readline support in SQL*Plus. The idea is not new, and I have compiled and used rlwrap for quite some time. At the time, Frits Hoogland asked me why I didn’t use the EPEL package-and I had…

  • Kernel UEK 2 on Oracle Linux 6.2 fixed lab server memory loss

    A few days ago I wrote about my new lab server and the misfortune with kernel UEK (aka 2.6.32 + backports). It simply wouldn’t recognise the memory in the server: Ouch. Today I gave it another go, especially since my new M4 SSD has arrived. My first idea was to upgrade to UEK2. And indeed,…