YES! This long awaited time has come!

I was able to go through all the feeds. I have cheated a little but not intentionally. About a month ago, don’t remember exactly, I mistakenly hit “mark all as read” link of the Google Reader plugin on the Google Home page and there is no undo functionality as in the real Google Reader interface. At first I thought, that s…cks — I “lost” 1-2 months worth of valuable reading. Now, I think that was a great idea — I feel so much less stressed and relieved having my reader empty. I just need to make sure the same happens to my email Inbox one day! (Hint: if I missed to reply on something - it might be by accident. Ping me again.)

I hope I will have time to spend a bit on the BAAG web site but there are AUSOUG and UKOUG conferences coming and, even though I have presentations already, I need to change there quite a bit - I’m not happy with their last versions (will I ever be happy?).

Anyway, good to have all feeds read every day and I wish the same to you — my dear reader.

Some time ago (yeah… shame on me) I mentioned having troubles running CRS on virtual machines using VMware Server. I found a solution a while ago and, since I promised to share if I find anything, now is the time.

First of all, I’m happy to admit that my observations regarding Windows hosted VM’s running better compare to Linux hosted were wrong. Indeed, how can Windows run faster than Linux?!

I used VMware Server 1.0.3. As host OS I used 64 bit Ubuntu or 32 bit Windows. Guest OS was 32 bit Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 (a la Larry Hat 4). As you could see later, I tried VMware Workstation 6.0 as well without any visible improvements. For shared storage I use either NFS exports from host OS (when using Ubuntu) or Openfiler when using Windows (even more CPU saturation).

To recall the problem… Virtual machine started to eat CPU like crazy when I start CRS inside virtual machine. Even without Oracle database - just starting CRS is enough. I could see that vmware-vmx process was consuming about 60% on one CPU core (AMD Athlon64 3800 X2). Inside virtual machine I could only see from time to time init.cssd in top and average CPU consumption jumping from 10% to 90% without any process in top that I could see. I tried strace on vmware-vmx processes in my host OS - could only see that most of the time is spent in poll system call.
Continue reading ‘CRS eating CPU on VMware’

If you haven’t added Mary Ann Davidson’s blog to your RSS reader, you should at least check it out. It’s relatively low traffic but every post is quite long and full of interesting thoughts. Give it a shot.

Today, I’ve got a reminder about disclosing your bias and professional ethics. Not that it’s something completely new but after reading this post, you tend to re-evaluate some information sources and events.

PS: Hm… does this blog come back to life?

Just saw this this blog post and even spent 10 minutes watching the video demo.
In under one hour and could be as low as 30 minutes!?
Continue reading ‘Adding a RAC Node with “One-Click” in Gird Control?’

I just wondering how people have time for that twittering, flickering, blogging, facebooking, del.icio.us-ing, listing, and other 42 types whatnot-web-two-point-zero-ing, and still getting some work done and keeping family happy.

I’m definitely doing something wrong here. :-\
I guess I’m just too slow…

I can’t resist mentioning this super cool feature here. It might be old news but that’s how I can catch up on my feeds. Anyway, Google Reader can now search all your subscriptions.

How many times you were looking in your reader history for a particular blog post you read 2 month ago but only need now?

Update: Here is the automated way to install 32 bit Firefox (and its clones) as well as Flash, Java, Mplayer and maybe other plug-ins (new are added as you read). Kudos to Kilz.

When few month ago I upgraded my desktop PC’s memory to 4 GB, I installed 64 bit Ubuntu since my 32 bit Windows could only use 3 GB, which is a little tight to run several virtual machines. I’ve already tried few times to switch to Linux as my main OS but never really succeeded. This time I decided to try Ubuntu which is more friendly to desktop users. I should say that I’m working with Linux on servers for quite a while (I first started with Oracle on SUSE Linux about 6 years ago and had to administer Linux Servers) but whenever I switch to Linux on desktop - my productivity drops.

I should say that I was much more pleased with Ubuntu compare to my earlier attempts with SUSE or Red Hat options. Software management and installation is much easier with as long as it’s provided within one of its repositories. I’m perfectly fine to install and, if needed, compile something manually but in the end it becomes a nightmare to make sure that things keep working and not impacted by other installs or upgrades. Ubuntu almost solved it.

The problem I hit yesterday was with Flash 9 Plugin (I was trying to open Google Analytics). I couldn’t get the plugin provided by Macromedia to work with default Ubuntu Firefox. Apparently, the plugin is only working with 32 bit Linux/Firefox. I tried to install standard flash plugin from Ubuntu repository (libflash-mozplugin) but it wasn’t working — just crashed my Firefox.

After some research I found Firefox2AMD64Flash9Java link that suggested to install 32 bit version of Firefox for that purpose. I followed this page’s idea (the instructions are a bit loose and reference older versions) and successfully installed 32 Firefox and Flash 9 Plugin. For Java Plugin I installed ia32-sun-java6-bin and linked the plugin from there. Looks like it’s working pretty well so far but I really hate these productivity stoppers.

I should mention, perhaps, that I was able to setup read-write access to my NTFS volumes using ntfs-3g driver and vice versa - I setup Ext2 IFS for Windows enabling my Windows environment to read and write Ext2 and Ext3 filesystems.

I should also say that it took me quite a bit of time to install VMware Server on 7.04 Ubuntu. I had to patch some files and it took a while to find the way to do it. Now you can use instructions from here. There is some information that latest Ubuntu kernels have some special optimization speeding up virtual machines but I wasn’t sure if it’s enabled by default with VMware server. Anyone has more info on those KVM, VMI and Para-Ops and VMware for Ubuntu?

Actually, I have issues with VMware performance compare to Windows host. I compared virtual machine running only 10.2.0.3 CRS (no Oracle instance) and on Windows it takes about 15-20% of one core while with Ubuntu it consumes about 50% of a single core. Inside the virtual machine, there are only slightly visible init.cssd processes (1-2% in top). In both cases it’s not normal and there is something special about this CRS running inside VMware guest. It just worse on Ubuntu than on Windows. I will do some more research on it and, probably, a blog post will be in order.

You have probably read it already on my Pythain group blog but I would like to repeat it here to make sure you, my dear reader, don’t get a chance to miss it.

I would like to announce that last weekend the BAAG party was born. I have finally managed to introduce Joing BAAG Form and the list of BAAG members which is tiny so far. I’m very excited about it and looking forward to this project.

If you are tired of observing troubleshooting by guessing day by day, by day, by day, by … — join the forces of BAAG party. We can make a difference together! See you there.

Guesswork - just say no!

You probably wouldn’t expect a technical Oracle post here. But I can’t call it Oracle blog without relevant content so here it goes. Let’s call it a late birthday present — my first post came on the 2nd of May, 2006 so it’s now one year, one month and one week old.

Today, purely by accident, I came across Metalink Note 413098.1 Extremely Poor RMAN Backup Performance to NFS After Upgrade to 10.2 on Solaris. It seems that it also affects HP-UX at least.

What I love the best from that note is the workaround for RAC environments:

Do not write backups to NFS at 10.2. Backup to tape using Oracle Secure Backup or an alternative Media Manager or backup to a local disk drive.

Oracle Secure Backup?!?! Does it mean mean it has fewer bugs? Nice ad.

I.e. if my backup infrastructure is based on NFS - I’m screwed. The advice basically turns into “do not backup your databases - it’s slow”. Where are the other workarounds like stay on 10.1 or 9i? “Don’t use big databases” would be just as appropriate.

If I have time, I’m going to test it on Linux but if someone has interest - benchmark backups from 10.1. and 10.2 on NFS and let us know. Better yet, run it through strace and check the system calls.