Distant rumblings from Eric

Those that have worked with me or have seen my resume know that being at an employer for three years is a rare occurrence. In a couple weeks this will occur regardless* if I turned in a two week notice today. 

Seems crazy but the time has went by fast. The opportunity to work more from home certainly helps improve job satisfaction. Will this pass my all time record on length of employment? We shall see.

*Unless immediate termination occurs

It’s the designated Quarterly Maintenance weekend for my day job though not all that much I had to assist with since I’m only 50% on the sysdba team. So since I was sticking around for the weekend and there really isn’t all that much to do otherwise while my wife worked I took the time to get Oracle RAC setup in my home server environment again. My previous install was blown away quite a while back to make room for other cool projects.

This time around the entire install was based upon the latest release (11.2.0.3) of the Grid Infrastructure and Database. Also this time around I setup the Xen guests as paravirtualized (pv) rather than full (hvm) and used CentOS 5.7 rather than Oracle Enterprise Linux. I hadn’t had experience setting up OEL as a pv but last Fall found a slick way to install CentOS. I’ll miss out on things such as ACFS but I have no desire to use ASM as a LVM (probably since the shared disk I use for ASM is essentially LVs over iSCSI – you can only virtualize so much before it’s pointless -no?)

Overall the entire setup was quite easy. Using open-iSCSI on the guests was the only real thing different from my 11.1 RAC installs. It seems like each RAC install since 11.2 has really been improved and has become quite flawless. I have no real use case for RAC but at least I have a recent setup around again to play around with.

I also decided to attempt my first installation of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. I had one other database server with an adequate amount of memory to attempt the installation but so far it’s been slow going (stuck at 66% for quite some time). I’m sure my ‘ignoring’ the 3GB physical RAM requirement will cause an issue since WebLogic loves to crash on low-memory machines (java… meh) At least I tried and suppose I could always shutdown the two RAC nodes to reclaim 4GB of physical RAM to ensure a successful installation.

So, there you have it, my weekend in less than 500 words.

Note: Summary of installation steps to be provided on Samdog Consulting site in the near future.

Update: Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c install did actually die upon first attempt. Successfully installed after server was brought up with 5GB physical RAM. It’s a pig but to be expected I suppose...

As for recent I’ve been noticing that I’ve been getting involved with less and less tasks which match my skillset. I guess I should be happy to have freedom to do new things but feel my time at work could be put to better use.

One thing that has been sort of fun is get back into some Perl scripting. I had originally thought of using shell or python but shell was lacking in support of regex I was trying to do and was unfamiliar with connecting to a db with python using the version on the server. Using the Perl included in the Oracle home seemed like the ideal solution as it required no additional module installation (i.e. DBI). So far so good and progress is being made despite the constant requests for status updates…

Career enhancements: nil

Once again it’s been a while since the last post, where does the time go?
New job is going well, doing a combo of security and environment setup. The only downside is having no rights on most environments, a feeling of powerless… Though that means less of a chance to get blamed if something breaks 🙂

Can’t believe Valentines Day is almost here, I have some good things for Ingrid.
Only thing else going on is a pending rebuild of my desktop PC, it’s been nearly 16 months, would like to rebuild that before starting on a new development project I have in mind. More to come.