One of my most frequently-visited blog posts is Retrieving Oracle patches with wget. Recently, a commenter asked about using wget to download software from Oracle Technet (OTN). It’s a little more complicated to use wget to download from OTN, because there are cookies involved. This post discusses how to extract the relevant cookies from Firefox and Google Chrome, and use those cookies with wget to retrieve files.
A quick demo of using the –queryformat option to rpm to retrieve the architecture of an installed RPM.
The excitement of solving mysteries makes me bad at math
In my last post, I failed to notice that a HugePages_Total of 4645, while satisfyingly greater than zero, is definitely not 8196, the desired and expected value I had configured. Upon reflection, the reason was pretty obvious: the OS will only allocate contiguous blocks of memory [...]
What happens when I try to use instructions for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES9) to enable hugepages on SLES10? Nothing. And that’s a problem.
Strange things can happen when people ask themselves a question and are unwilling to let go of it. Some retreat into seclusion to ponder the meaning of life. Some waste hours reading ultimately unrelated content on Wikipedia. Some spend way too much time writing marginally (if that) useful solutions to their questions. In this post, I’m guilty of that last one, though I’ve also been known to do the Wikipedia thing. My question? “Hey, if how could I find the largest files and subdirectories in this directory?”
While working from home this evening, I had to download some patches to a remote Linux system, and was struck, not for the the first time, by the inconvenience of it all. So I wrote a quick shell function that helps me grab patches using wget. And then, I decided to share with the world, or at least the really small portion of the world that visits my blog.
When installing Grid Control on a Linux or Unix platform, a recommended practice is to install the monitoring agent software as a user that doesn’t own the ORACLE_HOMEs to be monitored. This poses a challenge when configuring monitoring for some targets, particularly those based on Oracle Application Server 10g. This post lists some changes you can make to work around a variety of target discovery and metric collection errors.
Here’s a quick list of reference links for deploying Oracle Grid Control 10.2.0.4 on Linux. If you’re starting out on a Grid Control deployment project, perhaps this will help to jump-start your own research. This is a non-exhaustive list, but it covers the basics reasonably well.
Correctly defining Oracle-related environment variables in a Linux or Unix session is pretty important, especially on a system that hosts multiple ORACLE_HOMEs. Equally important is making sure that old settings are removed from the environment when switching contexts from one ORACLE_HOME to another. Here’s an example of how I do it.
This is the second half of a two-part series on useful Linux/Unix environment variables and aliases for enhancing your productivity as an Apps DBA.
