Oracle RAC Templates on VMWare ESXi

March 31st, 2012

A little while ago I started and managed to get an oracle RAC template to run from cmwares ESXi.
The long story short is that I installed OracleVM in a virtual machine created on the ESXi with a 100 GB hdd.
So basically now I had a hypervisor running inside a hypervisor. Yes, it works just fine.
Then installed oracle VMM on another virtual machine on the ESXi.
Then I enabled promiscuous mode on the virtual machines private vswitch. Absolutely a must. This is a deal breaker. Unless you do this, you will not be able to ping from domU into the internet, only another domU or dom0.
Then installed the RAC templates on the Oracle VM as normal, following the documentation.

At this point I was having a working RAC environment, with the only drawback that it had the overhead of running inside a secondary hypervisor.

So nect step is to move the RACs out of Oracle VM and into vmware ESXi.
This appears to be trickier. I tried vmware converter on the running RACs. Node 1 I converted as is but then it wouldn’t boot because it was running a XEN kernel and that is not supported by vmware.
So for node 2, I rebooted into the non-xen kernel, the el5euk one. I had to manually edit grub to boo that by default because as it seems, nice little oracle VM doesn’t give you much chooce to see the booting process. Maybe it’s possible but I didn’t had the need to figure out since I knew how to edit the boot menu.
Then I converted node 2 and now when it boots it will eventually go into a kernel panic as, the only errors I was able to see prior to the kernel pani, it cannot mount the partitions.
I tried installing different kernels by using a centos livecd and chroot-ing to it but to no avail.

Next step is to modify the original rac2 to have a modified non-xen, non-euk kernel and see if that works. If I don’t forget, I’ll keep you updated on this progress.

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VMWare player drag drop between virtual machines freezes one of them

March 4th, 2012

I am doing some testing and developing, using 2 virtual machines and I need to frequently move data between them. I figured easy way is to drag and drop from one directly to the other.
This was working fine until the source VM froze. I couldn’t even switch to it. or interact with it in any way.
I restarted all the vmware services to no avail.
Then I looked at the processes and notice vmware-unity-helper. :lightbulb:
Killed the process and everything went back ton normal.

PS: to all those who are watching my vmware related posts: in a about a month from now I’ll set up my first personal ESXi (I have one at work). That will be GOLD 😉

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How new programming styles and paradigms makes one stupid

February 20th, 2012

I think we all know by now how a big resource hog every single application today is.
I’ve been ranting for a while on browser memory hogs. All major of them. This are still unchanged. My FF currently eats up 2 GB of memory.

Here’s another fine programming example:
I was installing flash player 11.1, upgrade. However, the idiot started after my browser with about 100 tabs opened. So I left it running for the day in order to not forget to update at the end of the day.
And at the end of the day, I don’t remember why, I checked the task manager and surprise surprise: the upgrade program used 2 hours of CPU time, 300 MB of memory and 2.131.894 handles open…. over 2 million open handles.

Are you guys nuts?

Do none of you understand that system resource ARE FINITE and LIMITED?

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Delphi XE2 bug: memory leak

February 17th, 2012

That’s an easy one to reproduce if you are building a lot. All you need to do is keep building. Same project, or different one. Just keep building and watch the memory grow, grow until you get an Out of memory error.

Xe2 SP3. seriously? is this your level? The basic operations in your second version of XE at the 3rd service pack are still not working right? When in Gods name are you going to release a XE2 IDE that builds right? Am I really asking for too much? I haven’t even gotten to test the unicode and 64 bit support as I’m still migrating (way too many projects) and I’m already sick of this. All I want is to build. A very simple and basic command. The first one you use when you are building your application in order to be able to test it.

I just can’t believe this. Memory leak? COME ON!!!

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Delphi XE2 bug: nested option set depth limitation

February 8th, 2012

Some time ago I bumped into a very odd limitation on option sets (beside the bug I posted earlier). It’s about nested usage, when you have nested build targets, each with its own option set. You can see a more descriptive example in the stackoverflor post below:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8863041/delphi-xe2-option-set-nested-limit

I got to tell you, there are quite a lot of annoying bugs I keep bumping into with this XE2. I was so happy to see all the supported features that ease building so that I won’t have to write up complex batch files for it but bummer, they are buggy or don’t work at all.

The stupid thing is that if I modify one common file located some 10 packages up in the groupproject, I have to rebuild ALL the 10 packages, with ALL the 8-10 build targets.

Oh well, back to batch files.

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Delphi XE2 bug: build events not saved in option set

February 8th, 2012

As I’m working on a groupproject with a lot of projects each having a lot of (the same) build targets, I decided to go with option sets to have a good centralized control over things.
The surprise came when the build events didn’t work anymore the next day after I added them. Took me a little to figure out they were not saved. A little googling turned out he issue to be reported since well over a year on D2010. It’s “good” to see the bug to have gone by over 2 versions and a lot of updates.

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Delphi XE2 bug: build multiple targets

February 8th, 2012

When Building multiple targets on a project (like release and debug, in the same time (that is you select them all, shift select) and rightclick and then build, you will notice that the configurations used are those of the active configuration. So if you have the release active, then even though it builds the debug, it will do it with the release configurations (that includes option sets as well).
How to reproduce?
Have a project with multiple targets. Set different conditional defines in each (either directly or via option set, doesn’t matter), select them all, right click, and build. After the build, check the command line in the output and try not to curse. Took me about 2 hours to figure out why one of my projects was using a unit even though the conditional compiler directive was flagging to use another.

PS: if you think that using a build group saves you, surprise: it has the exact same bug.

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Responsibility for human trafficking

November 25th, 2011

Lately I see reading and seeing news about human traffic a bit more than before. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.
First, it’s good ad it appears that the phenomena is finally starting to be taken into control.
On the other hand, the issue is so old as this actually confirms its magnitude.
So who is really responsible for human trafficking, infantile pornography and so on?
The truth is that the real persons responsible for this are our friends and family. And in case of some readers, ourselves.
The truth is that if people wouldn’t *ask*, people wouldn’t provide. The bigger the demand is, the more people will provide.
It’s the same with beggars. If people would stop providing them with money, they will stop begging and only those that beg for food will remain.
It is astonishing to see how decayed the human race has become. Children raping children is the ultimate in decaying.
When what is thought to be innocent is no longer innocent, what can we expect from the adults? But obviously, this is just a mirror of ourselves.
People take bribe because we all offer it. How could they turn us down? Same goes here: if somebody asks for a 3 year old child for his/her sexual pleasures, how could a “bad guy” turn him down?
The morality of the human race is at its lower limits. We can go lower than this. I’m actually pretty sure there are quite some persons out there that are already a lot more lower than the race. And I know this because there are people that are higher than the race and in order to have a balance, there must exist such evil.
But don’t even think the balance is at the level of bad and good. That is only in theory when the race itself has 0 badness and 0 goodness.
In reality however, the balance is at the level of the race, which unfortunately is a lot lower than level 0. We are not becoming more civilized with time passing. On the contrary. The vast majority is becoming more stupid, more under control, and more out of control.
And this happens on all levels of civilization, including, in this practical case, morality.
People, allegedly, are becoming more free of inhibitions. In reality, there are some people with lower moral that require that their low morale be closer to the races level so that if for whatever reason their dark secrets are uncovered, they won’t be that dark.
100 years ago, having sexual relations with the opposite sex was more of a tabu. Nowadays, people get married with the opposite sex. It became normal. In some states, teenage pornography above a certain age can be considered consensual and thus no longer a crime.
The lower we allow our personal morality to go, the lower the race will sink.

Solution? Treat the provider in the worst way possible. And the consumer worse than the provider.

I believe that if there was a genuine and strong possibility for a consumer to be burned alive, that person will most likely not ask to satisfy his/her “moralness”.
Some would say that it is barbaric, medieval to treat a person this way. I am asking those people: do you really believe such a person is a human being? Can a person that sexually exploits a 1 year old be called a human being? Are you more against such treatments because you yourself are close in morality to this level? Maybe you had forced yourself on somebody? Sure, there will be people that are genuinely against such treatments because they are too good and can’t bear the thought of another person, be that so low, of being treated this way.
But the majority? What is the excuse of the majority? Why aren’t you taking a stand? Those under aged children cannot protect themselves from these predators, from these animals.

But, of course, the rapist will always have more rights than his victims. It’s normal, these days.

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Pity

November 22nd, 2011

It is a pity how one person can become from a very important one, the person you totally forget about. Or willingly ignore. And do that in a relative short time.
Quite often, I had this feeling of being manipulated. And I don’t mean the subtle approach either, but the one that almost cries into your face: hey stupid, you’re an idiot.

But, all things come to an end, eventually. We just have to make peace with the outcome and move on.

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Greasemonkey (user) scripts in Chrome

October 14th, 2011

After a little digging around I found that most (all?) my greasemonkey scripts will work in google chrome just well provided you will be using the Tander Monkey extension.

So .. go get it, install and enjoy.

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