As part of the process to get an Exadata rack ready for running 19c databases, many clusters have to go through an upgrade from Oracle Linux 6 to Oracle Linux 7. As part of that upgrade, Oracle took the opportunity to make several configuration changes for security purposes. One of those changes relates to the… Read More »
This is a continuation of my previous post regarding dropped ACFS snapshots. In this scenario, a user logged in to a virtualized ODA system and deleted the underlying ACFS snapshots for multiple virtual machines on the host. Oracle advises how to back up and restore guest VMs on an ODA in MOS note #1633166.1. The… Read More »
**While the story is true, any identifying details have been changed to protect both the guilty and the innocent** I woke up to a message the other day from a colleague on a project where I occasionally provide assistance. He was a bit panicked – they use an Oracle Database Appliance as a utility server… Read More »
I’ve been playing a bit lately with Oracle VM on a few different platforms (ODA, Exalytics, Private Cloud Appliance) and was tasked with creating a good Oracle VM template image for Oracle Linux 7. Oracle makes templates available on eDelivery (https://edelivery.oracle.com) that present you with VM configuration questions on first boot, but those VM templates have a… Read More »
While preparing for a virtualized Exalytics upgrade, I was testing the various connection methods that would be needed. Last on the list was to validate that I could connect to the ILOM’s web interface, launch the java console, and mount an ISO file from my laptop to the machine. This is necessary because the… Read More »
There has recently been a lot of news about the exploit revealed in the bash shell. While the fix is very quick to implement, there are a couple of tricks that are required to install this update on an Exadata environment. According to Oracle support note #1405320.1, Exadata storage server versions 11.2.3.x.x and 12.1.1.x.x are susceptible… Read More »
When the 11.2.3.2.1 release of the Exadata Storage Server software was released, I was a little excited. There were numerous oneoff patches for the previous release, 11.2.3.2.0, which was the first version to support the Exadata X3, writeback flashcache, run UEK on the X#-2 systems, etc. With that many large changes introduced in one version,… Read More »
One of the new requirements of the Exadata Storage Server patches (starting with 11.2.3.1.0) is that the compute nodes will be patched through yum. Previously, the minimal pack was bundled with the storage server patch and applied directly to the database servers. Instead of having the compute node directly receive updates from Oracle’s yum repository… Read More »