stevencrowder.com

I run Openfiler at home for my NAS/SAN needs (yes, I have NAS/SAN needs at home), and thus far it's been great. It integrates with Active Directory for authentication/authorization, can export disks, LUNs, block devices, etc., in many ways (iSCSI, NFS, CIFS/SMB, HTTP/WebDAV), and it seems to be rock solid as far as stability goes. Today I wanted to grow my home logical volume by 15GB, and it wouldn't let me because it said that a snapshot existed on the LV. I went in to manage snapshots, and no snapshots were listed. Here's how I fixed it.

I don't know about you, but I spent a good deal of time reading documentation and searching other blogs to piece together information that I thought should be plentiful about building an Oracle database from the command line. This was part of a RAC migration, so there was even less information out there.

I have posted all of my scripts and configs here on stevencrowder.com. Hopefully some poor soul will find this information helpful, and will not have to spend hours and hours piecing together information from 10-15 different sources.

My colleagues were the ones that handled this migration, but for those that are interested, here is what they did.

Some people can run completely homogeneous environments at home and at work, and it works fine for them. Personally, I think they are missing out, because I think that no single operating system does every task perfectly. For instance, NFS has better file locking and clustering capabilities than SMB/CIFS, and is thus a more capable network file sharing/system protocol. Linux, however, isn't as robust when it comes to mobility when compared to Windows or OS X. So, in my computer world, I run a variety of operating systems to fulfill all of my needs. My file server and router machines run different flavors of Linux (Fedora 8, Smoothwall), and my HTPC and laptop runs Vista. This can sometimes cause a problem when trying to get content from one machine to the next, and the solution comes with Microsoft's Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications and Services for Network File Systems.

Since I frequently write scripts, live at the command line, and write basic java or php code, I wanted a way to insert code snippets into my blog without breaking the formatting of the page. I found the Code Filter module for Drupal, recommended by Scott Howe. Let's see how it works...

We are currently discussing plans to migrate our 4 node Oracle Real Application Cluster database to 64bit hardware, along with upgrading to the latest 10g release. This will be a long process that I will document over the coming months here at stevencrowder.com.

The first part of the migration will be deciding how the downtime will be allocated, and how the process will proceed. Do we want to do all 4 nodes at once? Do we migrate 2 nodes, bring them back into the cluster, and then do the other 2? Is that even supported?

I will answer these questions and more very soon.

For a while I've been using Wordpress to handle the content for my website, but it lacked the flexibility I needed. It can be used as a content management system, but it was really limited to blog style content. I wanted something a bit more flexible, so I've switched over to drupal. I'll be using it for a while to see how well it works.

That's all.