First things first, then: having emailed them a reluctantly-scanned copy of the receipt for the laptop, I rang the next day at 8.01am… and was immediately answered by a charming, polite and efficient bloke. After a quick 20 seconds calling my details up on screen, he simply asked for my credit card number, the address to which the disks should be shipped… and that was that. No hassles, no being kept in a queue, no strife. Service as it should be, I think.

Second things second: although I had been warned that the disks might take up to 5 working days to arrive, they actually arrived the next day. Efficiency, indeed.

Third, the “Customer Service Team Leader” took the trouble to write a long and detailed reply to my earlier emailed complaint. He stepped through the things I’d mentioned, point by point. He apologised for lines not being open when they were supposed to be, and for the recorded voice message advising incorrect opening times. He said he’d get the voice message amended as soon as possible -and the same thing about the email template that mentions a ‘Windows product key’ that Windows 8 users won’t have.

And then the biggie: he took the trouble to explain why Toshiba asks for the receipt in these circumstances:

For older versions of Windows where the product key has faded or missing from the base of the notebook, it was Toshiba’s process to collect the proof of purchase to show ownership of the notebook. I appreciate your feedback that since customers are willing to provide their payment details and delivery details [when purchasing the recovery disks] that their identity should not be in doubt. With Windows 8 now having the product key injected into the unit, I am currently reviewing our process with recovery disk orders.

You can’t get fairer than that, really: there was perhaps a legitimate reason for it back in the day; he recognises that reasoning doesn’t necessarily apply now; he promises to look into it and see what alternative approach he can come up with for the future.

My kind of customer response, really. And then this was the icing on the cake:

As a gesture of goodwill and thanking you for the time to provide feedback, I would like to refund the cost of these recovery disks to your credit card account.

I don’t think that’s ever happened before: taking the time to complain gets called ‘providing feedback’ and warrants getting your money back! Brilliant, Toshiba, and thank you.

Summing up: I think my complaint was legitimate, and Toshiba has responded to it extremely well and generously. As I say, although it would be great not to have to complain in the first place, you can’t ask for a better outcome when you do. Toshiba return to my good books, then!

Incidentally, my enquiry of the Department of Fair Trading suggests that Toshiba is within its rights to ask to see the receipt (though I remain unconvinced), but that if I couldn’t provide one (maybe because I’d lost it, maybe because it was a gift, etc) then Toshiba would not be within their rights to use that as justification for not supplying the recovery disks.That is, they have discretion in the matter and could well waive the receipt requirement on a case-by-case basis. Anyone for whom the requirement was not waived would be withing their rights to make a formal complaint to the Department, who would pursue the matter directly with Toshiba.

Happily, it didn’t come to that, and hopefully, given the response from Toshiba above, it won’t do so for anyone else in the future.

Fortunately, a quick install of Classic Shell immediately after Windows 8 installation makes TIFKAM go away, almost completely. It’s free, too. (There are other Start menu replacements, but most of them cost a few dollars. Classic Shell, though, does all I need it to do for none at all). You may need to do a few ‘open with’ tricks on various file types to stop them being opened with the new ‘Modern Apps’, but otherwise, once Classic Shell is in, it’s pretty much a Desktop Experience a la Windows 7: bearable!

Pro Tip: Classic Shell also works fine on Windows Server 2012, and is a god-send there, too.

Firefox 20 is a better privacy-protecting browser than Internet Explorer (at least in part because Adblock Plus, Noscript and Ghostery will run in the former but not the latter), so that bit of the Windows experience immediately got a makeover, post-installation, too.

I’m using Windows 8 Pro, and that comes with Hyper-V (I mean that it comes with the ability to install Hyper-V, because it’s not implemented by default). This is not available in basic Windows 8, but the Pro and Enterprise editions include it. The last time I used Hyper-V was back when Windows 2008 (1st release) was new, and I didn’t much like it, largely because on the desktop PC where I tried to use it, the presence of NVidia graphics drivers meant the entire PC stuttered and stammered badly (unable to play a little bit of audio without choking, for example).

Well, that problem is fixed. If your CPU uses Second Level Address Translation (SLAT, or Extended Page Table in Intel-speak; or Rapid Virtualization Indexing in AMD-speak), then that sort of performance stutter is completely gone. Most i3, i5 and i7 processors do include SLAT, and my one, happily, is on the list. So now I can bare-metal virtualize and play Mozart without wincing.

This means I can park my VMware Workstation license where the sun don’t shine; and I won’t be needing VirtualBox in a hurry either. The Hyper-V management tools are slick and well-integrated and a very nice step up from those desktop virtualization offerings, too. I particularly like the way Hyper-V makes displaying a VM entirely separate from running one. It’s true that you can switch a VMware VM to run in the background after you’ve started it; and if you run your VirtualBox VMs from the command line, they can run-but-not-display, too. But this capability is baked-in to Hyper-V and requires no post-startup or command-line shenanigans to get working, so I noticed it and liked it immediately.

“Guest Additions” are available for CentOS/Red Hat/Scientific, too, so those OSes are able to make best use of their virtual environments. Admittedly, there is no support for Solaris on Hyper-V, which might be a problem for me down the track. We’ll see.

In short, there’s a lot of Windows 8 hate about (the comments on this article are a nice snapshot of that sort of thing!); but I think much of it is overblown. Stick Classic Shell on it and you have a practically-pure 100% desktop experience, devoid of all Metro taint. On the other hand, you get very nice, very capable virtualization built-in for nothing, which has to be a plus. And to top it all off, it performs nicely, too (rather better than Win7 on the same hardware, I think, anyway).

It’s early days, and it could all end horribly in tears any moment now… but so far, at least, the trip back to Win8 has been ‘not bad’.

Yes, we are both completely bonkers, and fully understand that we are facing average maximum day-time temperatures of around 8 degrees Celsius (46 Fahrenheit for old-timers and American readers). But we will be in Aldeburgh on November 22nd, standing in the graveyard and paying respects to one of the great composers of our time. So it’s worth it.

I have also wangled a lifetime-desired trip to Bletchley Park (where we won the war by decrypting German Enigma traffic, happening also to invent computers along the way, just in passing). I’m looking forward to that a lot.

The trip comes with some costs attached, however (and I’m not talking about the unheard-of amounts that Aldeburgh’s White Lion hotel wants to charge us!). Specifically, ToH says that a new camera is needed since the last lot of London photos were a tad disappointing, and thus last Thursday we shelled out around $3000 for the Nikon D600 you see above. I coughed a bit, but since I’ve only just recently splashed out $2000 for a new Toshiba laptop, it’s difficult to complain much!

In fact, of course, there is no need to complain at all, because ToH’s former Nikon D80 gets handed down to me (definitely the ugly step-sister when it comes to matters photographical), and I accordingly take a rather large step up from the little Lumix DWC-FH20 I’ve been using for the past 4 years. The last time I used an SLR, digital or analogue, was back in the 1980s, when my trusty (built like a Soviet tank, in fact) Zenit did me duty in the likes of Bulgaria, Zimbabwe and Botswana… so it’s going to be a learning curve for me.

Of course, this means having to deal with RAW images and learning to stitch and crop them as the mood takes me -and thus I feel compelled to renew my hitherto fleeting acquaintance with Photoshop. And Photoshop, of course, means Windows (for Wine will let Photoshop 3 just about pass muster, but cannot cope with Photoshop 5, which we use chez Dizwell). And thus it is that only a fortnight after having purged the house of the last non-ToH-owned Windows machine, I have felt compelled to dump Fedora from my desktop and reverted to Windows 8. After 6 months uninterrupted Linux loveliness, I somewhat regret the move, but no way, no how am I going to try to wrestle GIMP into submission!

I hasten to add that it is not all ToH’s fault, since work is asking me to pick up some SQL Server administration duties, thus making domestic installation of Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 look like a sensible proposition for career prospects. Time to wipe CentOS off my two HP Proliant Microtower servers, then, after 9 happy months of just sitting there and working beautifully…

Some updates about Windows 8, Windows 2012, Hyper-V and SQL Server to come, too!

Little did I reckon with Toshiba.

First, there’s nowhere on their site you can request the re-installation media. I had to visit their site, poke around for half an hour and then give up and send a web-based general enquiry instead. No matter, I suppose: slightly inconvenient, but the message got through, since the next day brought a welcome response: please ring this phone number between 8am and 6pm, have a credit card, your laptop serial number and your Windows product ID handy.

No worries. At 8.01am this morning I rang…and got told that “the lines have now closed. They re-open 7am to 7pm”. Well, I’m guessing that since it’s past 8am and they’re not open for business, the reference to 7am is just a mistake. No problem: hang up, retry later.

Actually, I re-tried 8 times, between 8.01am and 8.08am. Only then did I get through.

No matter: at least I’m finally talking to a human. Ah, I say: I notice your earlier email to me mentioned I’d have to have a Windows product ID. Trouble is, the bottom of my PC shows a laptop model and serial number, but no Windows number. Yes, the Toshiba representative says: things have changed with Windows 8 and Microsoft don’t now have product numbers on the outside of laptops and PCs. (So, I ask myself, why did your email say I’d have to have one if that’s no longer true: time to update your automated email boilerplate with the reality of the Win8 world, instead of the old Win7, perhaps?)

Well, no worries: I have my credit card, my laptop serial number and I’m ready to do business anyway. Not so fast, says the Toshiba guy: we need to see the receipt you received when buying the laptop.

Now, I bought the laptop at the local JB Hifi store. That’s a transaction between me and JB Hifi. I used my credit card, so that’s a transaction between me and Visa. But nowhere, notime did I transact with Toshiba, and I don’t see why they get to see receipts of transactions between me and third parties. Ah, says Toshiba Guy: we have to establish proof of ownership. It’s a Microsoft requirement.

Well, I say, Microsoft wasn’t party to my transaction with JB Hifi either, so they’re no more entitled to my transaction records than you are. Somewhat less, I’d say, given that I wiped Windows off my laptop within a day of buying it!

I change tack: how do I get this receipt to you? Just email a scanned image of it, he says. But what if I don’t have a scanner, I say. Take a photo of it with your camera, he says. I point out that’s assuming quite a few things. Oh well, just fax it over, he concedes. I point out that that’s assuming quite a few things, too! (Does anyone still have a fax machine?!)

I point out that the laptop might have been a gift, and that as a result I might not actually have a receipt at all, despite having legitimate ownership of the laptop. I don’t believe he answered that one.

As one of my recent commentators moronically pointed out, these are all first world problems: but I’m nevertheless mightily and legitimately annoyed that it’s impossible to purchase re-installation media without having your privacy trampled on in this way. Since when did Toshiba (or Microsoft, according to them) get granted police powers to investigate issues of legitimate ownership of laptops? Don’t they just sell you the software to run on them, wherever you got it from??!

Even if one concedes that they have an interest in servicing requests from only legitimate owners, it’s all just pointless security theatre: I could knock up an impressive-looking receipt with a word processor and a bit of imagination, after all.

I’ve written to Toshiba to complain. I’ve also written to the Department of Fair Trading, since it seems odd to me that the question of my legitimate ownership of the laptop can be raised by my simply asking to be able to perform a factory reset, should I want to. I’m paying for the installation media, after all (or trying to!): it’s not being provided by Toshiba out of the goodness of their hearts.

I await a reply from them, and I’ll probably just email a copy of the receipt anyway… but Toshiba sucks on this one and I won’t be buying any more of their kit as a consequence.

It’s worked quite well, but has occasionally hung (and inevitably, it hangs just when a really good TV program needs to be recorded). and exhibited other, sporadic and quite rare, weird behaviours. The PC itself was an old rack-mounted monster and was beginning to show signs of its age. All things considered, therefore, I felt it was time to put it out to pasture.

What to replace it with? Well, my first choice might have been another PC running something like MythTV… but ToH has to be taken into account, which rather rules out anything requiring more than an on/off switch, to be honest. I wouldn’t call myself a MythTV expert, either; and the one thing I know about it for sure is that it can be scarily complicated… so no thanks! Something more “consumer electronic good”-like, and less PC-ish. Something that just works. Something that doesn’t cost the earth.

Well, the picture at the top of this post gives the game away: after exhaustive minutes of online research, we bought a Panasonic DMR-HW220. It comes with WiFi built-in, plays MKVs, has a 1TB hard drive, twin HD tuners… and thus seemed to fit the bill perfectly, especially because it was only $340.

If only I’d read the small print (or the online reviews that spell it out!): whilst the machine is Wifi-aware, it has no concept of mapping network drives. It can’t see Samba shares. It’s network capabilities are, in fact, limited to acting as a DLNA server and/or client.

DLNA?? Someone of my age and upbringing probably thinks it’s a splinter Irish terrorist organisation, but in fact it stands for “Digital Living Network Aliiance”, and it’s a set of standards built around UPnP to determine how different electronic media devices play nice with each other. In my home media center context, it means that the Panasonic is a DLNA Client, and that means something on the PC has to be running as a DLNA Server (and Samba or NFS don’t count).

Immediately, therefore, things are more complicated than I’d like: how to run a DNLA server on the CentOS box that’s hosting all my movies, music and photos?

Happily, such a beast does exist and it’s relatively painless to set up: MediaTomb. I could also have installed miniDNLA, which works very simply, too. You can obtain it with a simple “yum install mediatomb” once the RPMForge repository has been added to your list of software sources. Once it’s installed, you need to start the thing with a service mediatomb start -and a chkconfig mediatomb on to make it re-start automatically at every subsequent server reboot. Once it’s running, do a service mediatomb status to find out what port it’s running on: by default, it’s 49152, but a status check will make certain.

Once you know the port, just fire up a browser and type in an address of http://<server IP>:49152 (or whatever port you’ve determined is in use). You should see a pretty bare-bones interface. Select the Filesystem link and you’ll see a tree-like representation of your server’s hard disk structure. Navigate to where your media files are then click the ‘Plus-in-a-Circle’ button on the top right:

Here’s where you get to mark a directory (and it’s sub-directories, if you tick that ‘Recursive’ option) for inclusion in the list of what this DLNA server can, er, serve. Scoot on over to the Panasonic, select the correct option to act as a DLNA client and… bingo! The appropriate directories are now browseable.

Erm… except that none of my MKV files were actually playable! I could certainly see them on the Panasonic, but they were greyed out. I checked the box: “MKV Playback” was definitely there in big, bold letters. So why my MKVs couldn’t be played, I couldn’t quite fathom. Until I read up on DLNA a bit more and discovered that MKV is not a supported container format for DLNA. Some clients can deal with them, but most can’t… and the Panasonic certainly doesn’t.

Had I read the ‘Cons’ column at the top of this product review before purchase, I don’t think I’d have bothered with the Panasonic at all, to be honest: “Can’t play MKV over network”. Plain and simple.

My plans to workaround this awful limitation consisted of copying my MKVs onto a USB hard disk, plugging that in and having the media play from there. Except that when you plug in a USB disk like that, you have to “register” it with the Panasonic device …which means “format” it, and with some sort of file system the likes of which none of my Windows or Linux boxes have ever met before. Once the Panasonic has touched the disk, nothing else can, basically. Too late I discovered that the ability to plug in USB devices is intended to get stuff off the internal 1TB hard disk by way of backup, but not to let you put stuff on to it via a PC, for example. DRM rears its ugly head, therefore, and makes an obvious way of media ‘injection’ non-viable.

(I believe that the on-box claim for MKV playback relates to the ability to play from an SD card. Not exactly what I had in mind, though).

At this point, I fear it’s obvious that I haven’t done my homework, and I am accordingly saddled with a machine which barely meets any of my functional requirements (it can record two TV channels at a time in HD, but that’s about it).

There is one saving grace: MKV is a container, not a video encoding. It’s therefore possible to extract the contents of an MKV and re-pack it in an MP4 container (which the Panasonic does play over the network, because the DLNA spec says it must), without any re-encoding effort. (That’s important, because with a couple of thousand video files to deal with, re-encoding is not an option!)

Various tools can do this re-packing trick: on my Fedora box, perhaps the simplest is Avidemux. You open your MKV, set the Video and Audio Outputs to “Copy”, select “MP4v2 Muxer” as the output format and then click Save. Done locally, a video file is thereby converted from unplayable MKV to playable MP4 in a matter of seconds. Done by pointing Avidemux to my network shares over the wire, however, and it takes a couple of minutes per movie… which is too long to be practical.

The obvious trick is to perform the re-packing on the server itself, for which a command line tool would be good. There is actually an Avidemux command line tool (avidemux3-cli, if you’re trying to yum install it), but scripting it is a nightmare and even invoking it file-by-file is a pain in the butt. So, in the end, I created this little shell script as a file called movieconvert.sh:

#!/bin/bash
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
f=`ls *.mkv`
ffmpeg -i "$f" -vcodec copy -acodec copy `basename "$f" .mkv`.mp4
IFS=$SAVEIFS

The …IFS… lines are there to deal with the fact that a lot of my movie files have spaces in their names, which would result in ffmpeg trying to convert files called “2001″, “A”, “Space” and “Odyssey” instead of a single file called “2001 A Space Odyssey” (which would be wrong, of course, and thus just lead to runtime errors). Otherwise, the main action is done by invoking ffmpeg with a bunch of switches which demand the video file be copied, not re-encoded, but re-packed as an MP4, not an MKV.

I stuck that in /usr/bin (so it’s in my path), and now I can cd to any directory containing a movie file and do ./movieconvert.sh and everything then just happens automatically. Sure enough, the Panasonic can play the MP4s just fine, too.

So we settle down for the evening to watch one of the movies I’d converted into MP4, and all was going swimmingly. Until suddenly a pop-up appeared informing me that a scheduled TV recording was about to start and therefore the DLNA connection would have to be terminated. What??? Yup. It turns out that you can’t record a program in the background whilst watching a film over the network. Which makes this particular Panasonic a piece of crapola that got taken back to the store that sold it the very next day. Happily, a full refund was received with not too many questions asked.

So what am I using now? Funnily enough, exactly the same kit that the Windows Media Center originally replaced: a Western Digital WD TV Live, which does movies and music very well, using plain old Samba shares to which it connects without drama. And for the live and recorded TV, a relatively ancient Topfield TF-7100 (now about 4 years old, upgraded by yours truly to a 500GB hard disk some years ago, still going strong).

The only pain points in going back to this arrangement are that it would require 4 remote controls (WD TV LIve, the TV, the receiver/amplifier and the Topfield). Happily, a Logitech Harmony all-in-one remote control takes care of that. Which leaves just one real pain-point: the TV listings in Windows Media Center are clear and speedy to navigate. The Topfield equivalent is hopeless, displaying just one channel at a time and taking an age to load or move through. A many-channels-at-a-glance view would be good, but no such beast exists. Not even the paid-for ICE TV gives what is needed. For the moment, I have no answer to this one, then.

Whether we persist with this retro setup, I can’t say. However, I can say that the Panasonic DMR-HW220 is completely hopeless -and, indeed, that anything relying on DLNA is not something I’ll be letting into my house again any time soon! I am really surprised that there isn’t a single box which can do dual-channel live TV, multi-channel recording, Samba connections, MKV and FLAC playback, with a decent, synoptic program guide. But as far as I can tell, there simply isn’t: and that seems a curious gap in the market at this stage of the game!

Being extremely tired, I had hoped to snooze whilst the taxi worked its way to deepest southwest Sydney, but I hadn’t reckoned on the fact that I had somehow managed to pick the worst taxi driver in Christendom. Straight bits of road he could mostly do, but anything involving the slightest curve seemed to compel him to cross the lane dividing line, so that one or more wheels continually bumped as the white dashes stopped and started. In this lane-straddling fashion, we’d limp our way home for long, bouncy minutes at a time.

I could have lived with that, I suppose, but that would have been to ignore the drivers strange desire to brake and accelerate, more or less at random, and never with any warning. If the road curved ever-so-slightly, we slowed -abruptly- to around 60km/h. If the road straightened out so he could see which way the lane was going (i.e., straight ahead!), then 130km/h seemed more his sort of thing, with heavy application of foot-to-pedal. And this was on a well-lit motorway, not the country lanes we get to as we near my house. The less said about his capabilities on them the better!

I’ve seldom spent an hour and a half in such fear, to be honest. But if you’re stranded miles from home in the middle of the night, what else are you going to do?

The final fare ($357) was enough to have hired a helicopter for the evening, I think. Never again!!

I’ve updated all appropriate links, I think; and there’s a changelog here.

The old Q & A pages are still available -but only at this URL. I wouldn’t recommend posting any new questions or answers there, since few will ever read them.

The new Q & A forum is available from the main menu, front page of this site or by clicking here.

Membership is not required, but if you do register, you get to have a proper avatar and profile, which makes things maybe a bit more personal. Non-members can post questions or answers at at time, but each time will have to complete a Captcha. If spam levels go through the roof, the ‘no membership’ business will be changed in short order. Fingers crossed the Captcha works, then!

The forum software is a WordPress plug-in, so we must rely on the functionality its author has baked in. As far as I can tell, though, it will do the job. I encourage visitors to take a look, post a question or -even better- post an answer to a question someone else has asked. I certainly don’t intend to be the source of all wisdom and knowledge there, that’s for sure!

I’ve decided to go ‘static front page’ and try and organise the site content a bit better.

It’s mainly a reaction to pumping hundred thousand-line articles into Blog format thanks to Salisbury: hopefully, the new site structure will mean the blog can be a blog (and who knows: I might actually put more bloggy stuff into it?!) and the technical stuff can be clearly differentiated from it.

Until it’s all sorted, stuff might be tricky to find and the site seem otherwise incomprehensible. Please bear with me.

Back then, I promised a “son of Gladstone” replacement, “soon enough”. Little did I think it would take me six months to honour that promise! Such is life, I fear…

But Gladstone’s successor is now here… and, in keeping with (near) historical fact, that successor is to be called “Salisbury”. (That’s him on the right, looking suitably Victorian and bushy-bearded).

So, what exactly is Salisbury and how does he work?

Well, it’s a slight extension of the work I’ve been documenting in the previous dozen or so posts here: the idea of using Kickstart to automate the construction, the correct configuration and the Oracle software installation of Oracle servers. Additionally, it’s the use of a Kickstart-built server to supply all necessary network and shared-storage capabilities that Oracle Servers might need -especially if they run RAC.

In terms of tangible ‘product’, Salisbury actually consists of a single ISO download, just 27MB in size.

You use that ISO to kickstart the building of a Salisbury Server -a small server running RCSL that I’ve referred to in previous weeks as a ‘Linux toolbox’. Once your Salisbury Server is up and running, you use it to build your Oracle Servers. Those Oracle servers can run Oracle versions 11.2.0.1 or 11.2.0.3 in standalone or RAC mode. If you choose a standalone build, the Salisbury Server will automatically install the Oracle software for you, and create a simple shell script that will create a database when run post-install. If you instead choose to create a RAC-capable server, Salisbury will copy across all necessary software (and get users, groups, kernel parameters and so on correctly configured), but it won’t attempt to install anything automatically (because working out whether all the component parts of a cluster are up and running is a bit tricky!)

I present Salisbury here as, more or less, a fait accompli -but how it works and why are all things I’ve discussed in considerable detail over recent weeks, so if you’ve been following along, there shouldn’t be too many surprises (and if you haven’t, you can always step back to this post, which started it all, and read forward from there). I will try to pull it all together into a single, long article before long, though.

Building a Salisbury Server

The quick version of getting the Salisbury Infrastructure™ to work for you is this:

• Build a new server with at least 512MB RAM and 60GB free hard disk space. Ensure it has two DVD drives.
• Load your distro-of-choice’s full installation disk into the primary drive
• Load the Salisbury ISO into the secondary drive
• Boot your server and hit <TAB> at the boot menu. Make your build process Kickstart-defined by adding ks=hd:sr1/salisbury.ks to the bootstrap line.
• Sit back and let the installation process complete.

Your new Salisbury Server will have only a root user account (password: dizwell). You can change that password with the passwd command, of course.

The Salisbury Server will automatically be a web server, complete with all sorts of useful files and packages which it can distribute to client Oracle Servers. However, the really important stuff is Oracle’s database server software -and, much as I’d like to, licensing restrictions mean I can’t provide that for you. Instead, you have to source that yourself, either from OTN (for free, but only at version 11.2.0.1), or from edelivery (if you have a proper, paid-for subscription and want to download version 11.2.0.3 or better).

However you source it, you should obtain both database zips AND the grid zip and copy all three files to the /var/www/html directory of your Salisbury Server (FTP transfer with Filezilla or a similar tool is probably the easiest way of doing that).

In their wisdom, Oracle Corporation saw fit to name their software multiple different ways, depending on how you sourced it and what version you’re dealing with. This is a recipe for Salisbury Confusion™ -but it’s easily avoided by renaming whatever you download in a consistent way, as follows:

• oradb-1120x-1of2.zip
• oradb-1120x-2of2.zip
• oragrid-1120x.zip

Replace the “x” in those names to reflect the actual version in use, of course. There is no flexibility about this: the Oracle software components must end up being named in this way if the Salisbury Server is to be of any future use to you in building Oracle Servers.

By renaming files in this way, it’s perfectly possible to have one Salisbury Server be able to create both versions of Oracle database: just download all 6 files (the 11201 three and the 11203 equivalents), and rename them all according to the above-mentioned scheme. When both versions are possibilities, you’ll be able to specify which one to use for any particular Oracle Server at build time, as I’ll explain shortly.

So, after building your Salisbury Server, you just have to copy Oracle software to it (and rename it as appropriate), just once. After that, it’s ready for duty.

Note that the Salisbury Server build involves copying its own installation media to disk. If you build your Server using OEL 6.3, for example, then a /var/www/html/oel/63 directory will be created and populated on it automatically. Such a server can then only help build other OEL 6.3 servers. If you want to be able to build CentOS or Scientific Linux Oracle Servers, maybe mixing up versions 6.3 and 6.4 as the mood takes you, you can do that provided you create /var/www/html/centos/63, /var/www/html/sl/64 and similar directories yourself. The directory names have to be of the form /centos, /sl or /oel and the version directories have to be either /63 or /64. After creating any additional directories in this way, you can then simply copy over the contents of the full install media for that distro/version combination. Make sure you use the full installation media, not the “Live CD” versions. There is, however, no need to copy the second DVD into the directories where one is available: disk 1 will suffice.

Build an Oracle Server with Salisbury

Once your Salisbury Server is up and running, you can use it to construct new Oracle servers. An Oracle Server must have at least 2GB RAM and 25GB of free hard disk space.

You boot a new Oracle Server with the netinstall boot disk of your distro of choice. At the boot menu, you invoke the Kickstart process by pressing <TAB> and then adding a ks=<URL> string to the bootstrap line. That <URL> element will be formed from the following elements:

• Salisbury Server’s IP address
• kickstart.php filename
• five possible URL variables
• Two possible Kickstart parameters

It is assumed that your Salisbury Server has an IP address of 192.168.8.250 (if not, you’ll have to edit various files on the Salisbury Server itself).

The Kickstart filename is simply kickstart.php

The seven possible URL variables are:

• distro  (one of either centos, sl or oel)
• version (one of either 63 or 64)
• hostname (pretty much anything you like, so long as it’s a valid host name)
• domain (pretty much anything you like, so long as it works as a domain name)
• rac (one of either y or n, depending on whether you expect to be running a RAC or standalone database on the finished server)
• ip (the IP address of the server, in a.b.c.d form)
• ic (the IP address of the cluster interconnect, in a.b.c.d form, assuming one exists)

The two possible Kickstart parameters are:

• ksdevice=<name of network interface to use initially, if there are 2 or more network cards present, such as eth0 or eth1>
• oraver=<11201 or 11203, depending on which version of the Oracle software you want to use; can also be set to none to mean ‘don’t copy any Oracle software at all’… useful for second and subsequent nodes of a cluster>

You must supply a distro and version, but if you miss out any of the other parameters or variables, defaults will kick in. If you fail to supply an “oraver”, for example, 11.2.0.1 will be assumed; if you don’t say whether “rac” should be ‘y’ or ‘n’, a standalone, non-RAC installation will ensue, and so on.

At a minimum, therefore, you will initiate your Oracle Server build by typing something like the following at the bootstrap line:

ks=http://192.168.8.250/kickstart.php?distro=centos&version=63

A complete bootstrap line, leaving nothing to chance, would look more like this:

ks=http://192.168.8.250/kickstart.php?distro=oel&version=64&hostname=alpher&domain=dizwell.home&rac=y&ip=192.168.0.35&ic=10.0.0.1 ksdevice=eth0 oraver=11203

Notice that the URL variables are present as one, continuous string, begun with a “?”, separated by “&” and without any spaces. The Kickstart parameters, however, are supplied as space-separated keyword/value pairs at the end of the URL.

Of course, if you specify variables which imply software choices that your Salisbury Server does not have available to it, you can expect the Oracle Server build to fail. If you say oraver=11203, for example, when you’ve only stored 11.2.0.1 software on the Salisbury Server, then your finished server will have no Oracle software on it at all. If you’ve prepped your Salisbury Server to host all possible distro and Oracle versions, though, then you can specify any of the available options in whatever combination and expect a completely automated O/S and Oracle software installation accordingly.

Oracle Servers built via Salisbury will end up with a root user (password dizwell) and an oracle user (password oracle). You can change either or both of these passwords after installation, of course.

Non-RAC Oracle Servers will have a version of the Oracle software installed. No database will exist, but a createdb.sh shell script will have been created in the /home/oracle directory. Running that (as the oracle user) will result in the automatic creation of a database called orcl. SYS, SYSTEM and other administrative passwords will be set to oracle, but these can be changed using standard database commands at any time.

RAC Oracle Servers will have no software automatically installed, but an /osource directory will have been created, within which are database and grid directories containing the appropriate unpacked Oracle software. The software is therefore immediately ready for installation, whenever you’re satisfied that the entire cluster is up and running.

All Oracle Servers will be built with mounts of NFS shares made available by the Salisbury Server itself. There are two such mounts: /gdata and /ddata, which correspond to the Salisbury Server’s /griddata and /dbdata directories. Non-RAC Oracle Servers can just ignore the existence of these shares, but RAC Oracle Servers can make use of them during the Grid and Database software installs to store grid and database components on a shared file system. It is assumed that RAC Servers will use their own, local, non-shared file systems for storing the Oracle software components.

Both Salisbury and Oracle Servers can be managed remotely with Webmin (point a browser to it at port 10000). Both can also be monitored at the command line with nmon.

Oracle Servers will have rlwrap capability baked-in, so local SQL*Plus sessions will make use of it to provide a scroll-able command line history (that is, you can hit the up- and down-arrow keys in SQL*Plus to retrieve previously-typed SQL statements). Should anyone have ideas for what other software components would be useful to add to either the Salisbury or Oracle servers (or both), please feel free to drop me a line. If it’s useful and do-able, I’ll do it!

Note that both the Salisbury and Oracle Server builds are fatal to anything that might already be sitting on the hard disk of the servers involved: Kickstart is used to simply wipe all partitions it finds. Don’t point Salisbury at pre-loved servers that contain vitally-important data, therefore: you will lose it all if you do.

Conclusion

Salisbury is obviously a lot more complicated to describe than Gladstone! In practice, though, you should find it hands-free, highly automatic and, basically, a piece of cake to use.

The complexity arises because it’s an infrastructure, not a script -though it’s an infrastructure that bootstraps itself into existence courtesy of Kickstart scripts.

It depends on several version-dependent components, of course: Kickstart scripts designed for version 6.x RCSL distros won’t work with version 5.x RCSL distros, for example. Similarly, response files that perform perfect 11.2.0.1 Oracle installs blow up spectacularly when confronted with 11.2.0.3 software. I don’t expect Salisbury to cope with arrival of Red Hat 7 and Oracle 12 without a degree of pain, therefore! I do believe, though, that its underlying techniques and technologies are flexible and extensible enough to be able to cope as the future does its worst.

It’s taken quite some weeks to get it to this state: I hope someone out there finds it as useful as I have!

Known Issues

Forthcoming Attractions

• Response file scripts for Grid and Database installations (11.2.0.3 only)
• Shell script to automate the fix for 11.2.0.1 RAC on 6.x distros