Oracle Labs by Yuri Khazin, Oracle DBA

My favorite Firefox add-ons

oraclelabs — Mon, 02 May 2011 18:24:03 +0000

Let me share some helpful information with you. Something collected and tested over a few years…

Any Key – type in any language Yes, it is a phonetic transliteration

Transliterator – Similar to Any Key (may work in versions where Any Key does not)

WOT – Web Of Trust – Alerts you about dangerous links

WOT is an absolute MUST for anyone browsing the net. There is an uncountable number of evil sites on the net. Just skip “c” in “oracle” and watch what happens. I promise, you will be totally shocked when you see what kind of sites Google search brings you even in a sponsored section and how much malware you can get from an “innocent” web page.

“No color”. Remove colors and background images from the page in one click.

This one is experimental but I love it. It has one drawback – its effect is global, i.e. affects all tabs at once. Firefox and Opera have an option not to load images but this extension does it better.

Adblock – life saver !!! – Removes almost all advertisement

I am using Adblock for a long time and forgetting what a messy place the internet is. Only when I am forced to use IE it reminds me how lucky we are with Firefox.

Download Statusbar A very convenient thing for occasional downloads (replaces Firefox built-in, which is quite sloppy).

DownThemAll is all you can desire from a download manager This one is for massive queued downloads.

Flashblock. Never be annoyed by a Flash animation again! Another great thing, saves time and nerves.

QuickProxy switch turns on/off your internet proxy configuration. May come handy if you work from home using VPN.

NoSquint NoSquint allows you to adjust the text-only and full-page (both text and images) zoom levels as well as color settings both globally (for all sites) and per site.

And finally:

FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) lets you backup and restore all your installed plug-ins. Yes, even in a fresh Firefox installation you can restore all you plug ins in a few seconds.

VirtualBox 4.0.4 and network

oraclelabs — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:14:19 +0000

It is always exciting to play with new release of this favorite toy of mine. Not this time though. There are some changes in release 4.0.4 that I could not cope with. I was using release 3.2.12 before, it looks very modest and just works well. So first thing I have noticed in the new release was the sweeping changes to overall GUI, then I was puzzled by a disappearance of the button “New” in the “Virtual Media Manager” interface and finally, when installing OEL 5.2 (Red Hat), I could not get the Host-Only networks to actually work (the adapters were up and running but not accessible from host).

Some people have already complained about the problem that manifests itself as error message:

“the value of the MAC address field on the network page is not complete”

You can look at the discussion on the topic here (but there was no resolution at that time):

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=38253

According to some, the problem surfaces when you have more than one network interface, according to others it is only with some operating systems. As of this moment I gave up on this new release and reverted back to 3.2.12

Shareable disks in Virtual Box

oraclelabs — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 19:42:40 +0000

Recent versions of Virtual Box have support for “shareable” disks. This feature lets you build a RAC without using Openfiler or some other sort of SAN/NAS simulation software. Saves you one virtual machine in the setup.

I am not sure if this setup can be used with Oracle 10g RAC and whether this feature is stable enough, but here is an article by Tim Hall that describes Oracle 11g RAC built around this kind of disks.

Update: created shareable disks in 3.2.12 and used them under OEL 5.2 (you still need some clusterware-like software to properly share the disks).

Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 installation in Virtual Box

oraclelabs — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:43:25 +0000

This article is an addition to the project in progress: Building a Virtual Oracle RAC

First database node. Creating the guest, configuring hardware and Installing Linux.

Configuring Openfiler to simulate iSCSI targets

oraclelabs — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:37:35 +0000

This article is an addition to the project in progress: Building a Virtual Oracle RAC

Storage shared by RAC nodes. Configuring Openfiler to simulate iSCSI targets.

Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 in Sun Virtual Box – Installation

oraclelabs — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:47:53 +0000

This article is an addition to the project in progress: Building a Virtual Oracle RAC

How to install Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 in Sun Virtual Box

Building a Virtual Oracle RAC – Project Introduction

oraclelabs — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:18:00 +0000

Introduction: This learning experiment is about building a totally virtual Oracle RAC environment at home using only tools and software available to wide public, preferably open source (when possible).

My project is generally based on an excellent article by Jeffrey Hunter (and other authors) – Build Your Own Oracle RAC Cluster on Oracle Enterprise Linux and iSCSI

Jeffrey’s article gives instructions on how to build a physical setup. I do recommend reading this article or at least giving it some 10 minutes scan before you attempt to build a RAC. In that article Jeffrey estimates a cost to build a production RAC in physical environment between $20K and $30K. He shows that for the purposes of learning the technology a “mostly physical” RAC with some parts virtualized can be built for under $2700. I am going to take the virtualization to the extreme and build a RAC inside a single PC. Yes, I do not care now about performance, and yes, I am willing to buy some additional memory for the PC. You can not really expect to run two Linux nodes with databases and a storage (SAN) simulation on a PC with 1GB of memory. My estimated cost is, therefore, somewhere under $100, if all we need is a memory upgrade. Sounds good? It is still a lot of work and it will probably take you many hours to do it right. The benefit is a hands on knowledge, which is priceless.

Now to the choice of hardware and software.

PC or server with some 200GB space and 3.5GB memory (XP Professional can handle up to 4GB).
The host OS: Windows XP SP3 professional (although SP2 will probably do as well)
Virtualization software: Sun’s Virtual Box 3.1.2 (or higher). Works with no issues on both Intel and AMD processors.
Database nodes: Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 update 3 as a guest OS, running Oracle Database 10.2.0.1
SAN/NAS emulation software: Openfiler 2.3

My reasons for choosing particular software:

Host OS does not really matter, virtualization software can run on many different platforms. If you desire so, you can run this whole project using Linux as a host. Virtual Box is selected because it is an open source software produced by Sun Microsystems (which belongs to Oracle now).

Why Sun Virtual Box and not VMware? VMware is a popular product but I do not see a consistency in their support of free versions of the software. In my experiments with VMware I have encountered some obstacles while running Linux guests (particularly in networking and CPU clock synchronization). Virtual Box is an open source product and quite a mature one, well documented and supported. So far I was able to run OEL4 and OEL5 with no issues (even with no guest additions installed). I like the product’s built-in networking, it seems to be more flexible and stable. These are all my personal preferences, of course.

Why Oracle’s Linux? This particular flavor of Linux is a modified Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Oracle has made a few adjustments that allow Oracle 10g R2 database (32 bit) to install with no issues on it (usually, no additional RPM’s required). Since I am aiming to install Oracle in the guest(s) thus the choice of this Linux flavor. Besides, this Linux comes with OCFS2 and most of the ASMLib software packages installed. If you have a licensing question about Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) I can answer it. You only need a license if you want Oracle’s support. For learning purposes you do not need a license. If you will need to download some rpm libraries and updates you can get those for free, the YUM configuration can be pointed to a free repository (not discussed here).

Now the database itself. Which edition of 10.2.0.1 are we going to use? There is no clarity in that article on this matter, for now I assume the Standard Edition will do. There are some additional pieces of software from Oracle (or used by Oracle) to be installed, those are: OCFS2, ASMLib 2.0 and TAF.

Now that we know what we need to get started let’s split the work into more manageable mini projects, follow them just in this order, and hopefully all pieces will fit: