DISCLAIMER: Don't mess with the Oracle sysdba and system users on a production system unless you really know what you're doing. This kind of ad-hoc "try-and-see" stuff is for small installs that aren't very important. I'm no DBA and I can't help you be one; I'm just an engineer trying to get stuff working.

If you have a real DBA available, talk to him or her and have them teach you. Notice teach you. Don't let them just fix it, get them to walk you through it so you learn it and can document it for your team.

1) Oracle user password expired

By default, Oracle users expire after a few months, either 3 or 6. So this bites a lot of lab installs that stop working suddenly. To fix this, you need to login as a higher-level user, either system or sysdba.

Note: You can re-set the same password already being used (the one that expired). Oracle doesn't care.

$ sqlplus system

SQL> alter user MyAppUsername identified by MyAppPassword;
user altered;

Now, change password lifetime to unlimited so this never happens again: (capitalization not important)

SQL> ALTER PROFILE DEFAULT LIMIT PASSWORD_LIFE_TIME UNLIMITED;

profile altered;

Done!

If you cannot log in as the system user because you forgot that password, you can change it by logging in as sysdba user:

$ sqlplus / as sysdba

SQL> alter user system identified by PreferredSystemUserPassword;

user altered;

Final step: document all your usernames and passwords!

2. Disable detailed auditing

Oracle logs a lot of audit trail information. The information is dumped to a directory called 'adump' on the filesystem. The audit information has some performance cost. Worse, it can generate enough files that it breaks commands like 'ls' when you try to list them. I've seen a lab server with 28,000 audit log files. Running 'ls' and even 'rm *' failed. I had to use find or some other tool that was able to handle it without crashing.

Anyway, disabling the detailed audit logging is really easy. Again, log in as system or sysdba user:

$ sqlplus '/ as sysdba'

SQL> noaudit all;
SQL> noaudit all privileges;
SQL> noaudit exempt access policy;
SQL> exit;

If the system has been running for a while, find the 'adump' directory for your DB and delete the files in there.

$ cd /u01/app/oracle/admin/mydb/adump
$ rm *.aud

Setup a cron job to keep this directory clean in the future:

######### Clean up Audit logs

10 01 * * * /usr/bin/find /u01/app/oracle/admin/mydb/adump/*.aud -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1

That's it! Now you can easily fix expired Oracle passwords and disable unnecessary logging to keep your server in tip-top shape. Also, remember I am not responsible if you use these incorrectly or do something monumentally stupid.

In less than 5 minutes a member of the Webfaction support community identified the fix for my tremendously slow WordPress sites. The Dashboard was barely working and the site pages were very slow. The solution was 2 steps to tell WordPress to use a different PHP version. Problem solved!

from: https://readmill.com/tswicegood/reads/the-developers-code-for-travis-swicegood/highlights/fe4e

Deciding to make your product better in two ways every day is a good mental exercise to keep those large projects moving forward. In a working week, you’ll have ten better things to say about your product than you do now. In a working month, you’ll have forty better things to say about your product than you do now.

The travelling has moments of fun, but mostly it's hard work, dangerous food (it's tough to stay gluten free, especially abroad), and poor sleep.

Note to self: buy a few more nice dress shirts and slacks. My closet is pathetic.

We finally had the extra money to try again this year so got an estimate from a company my father-in-law recommended, Williams Insulation. Estimate: $425. Yeah, 25% the amount of Home Depot's contractor. The estimator also did a walk-through energy audit and suggested some really useful things.

The estimator actually found a whole section of attic we had never known about. He realized there was a gap along two whole sides of the house and suggested we cut a hatch to check it out. He turned out to be right — we found a space 40'x5' with even less insulation than the other main attic area. This was along the whole front and kitchen sides of the house.

I reported my findings and he came back for a free re-estimate. Amazingly, this added only $100 to the estimate, bringing it to $525. Frankly, we would have paid twice that and been happy about it. Five hundred bucks is a no-brainer!

The main prep work was to implement his main suggestion. He told us to tape up all gaps in the metal casings of can lights and ventilation fans, and encase them in styrofoam to fully air-seal them. He suggested the $2 styrofoam coolers from Wal-mart, which turned out to be the perfect shape and size for most of them. We had one larger fixture — the heat lamp in our shower — on which I used a larger, better cooler meant for shipping frozen goods.

I spent many hours up there the past few weeks, but particularly the past weekend. I spent half of Saturday and almost all of Sunday skittering around in the tiniest corners sealing everything. It had to be done carefully and correctly to make it permanent, at least until the fixture itself fails. I wanted to never have to crawl through all the new insulation to reach and work on this stuff.

Overall I sealed up 4 can lights above the kitchen, the rest being below the floor of the little playroom. In the main attic I replaced the non-working bathroom fan with a new one and sealed it up, and sealed up the other one that I replaced last year. I also ran ducting from the fans to exhaust outlets in the roof. There was one regular can light to enclose, then one huge heat lamp to enclose. All of those took a lot of work because of the cramped space. Much of it I had to work one-handed, holding myself on a joist with the other hand. It was brutal.

Monday night I worked from 9pm to 3am finishing up the various bits, including sealing up the huge hallway fan. It was quite a trial after a full day of work, boy scouts, and hanging out with Asa (my Little from BBBS). I was a mess of insulation, sweat, Great Stuff expanding foam, and grime.

The big payoff was Tuesday morning when the insulators came. In just an hour they crawled to all the dark corners of the attic and blew in insulation to the 20" mark. This gives an insulation of R-60, which is higher than even the latest standards for this part of the country. The work was fast, efficient, and looks great — a uniform sea of pink energy and money-saving fluff.

We've noticed our furnace running much less and the house feels warmer, particularly the upstairs office. We are super happy about the project. In fact, it's kind of embarrassing how exciting the insulation is to us. The insulation plus the work involved in prepping for it was really rewarding and feels like the best improvement we've done to the house since we replaced the doors. And the energy-saving aspect makes us feel generally good about ourselves and our house.

Really good long underwear for cold-weather camping and outdoor chores.

"Rayman Origins" game for Wii

Life is just great.

cgrep shell script: http://examples.oreilly.com/upt2/split/cgrep.sed

#!/bin/sh
#  cgrep - context grep via sed
#  Written by Greg Ubben, DoD, 10 Dec 1993
#
#  Cgrep finds all occurrences of <pattern> in <file...>, showing <context>
#  additional lines of context above and below each occurrence.  <context>
#  must be at least 1, and defaults to 2.  Each new block of context is
#  preceded by the line number of the first occurrence within that block.
#  <pattern> must be a grep-style regular expression, except that you can
#  match across lines, so use "\nWORD" vs "^WORD" and "WORD\n" vs "WORD$".
#
#  The following example will find all occurrences of the word "five" where
#  it is followed by the word "seven" somewhere within the next 3 lines:
#	cgrep -3 "five.*seven"

USAGE="$0 [-context] pattern [file...]"

n=3
case $1 in -[1-9]*)
	n=`expr 1 - "$1"`
	shift
esac
re=${1?}; shift

sed -n "
	1b start
	: top
	\~$re~{
		h; n; p; H; g
		b endif
	}
		N
		: start
		//{ =; p; }
	: endif
	$n,\$D
	b top
" "$@"

This is extra useful for production systems where you can't install packages or make changes to /bin. Just copy the script into your home directory, then either edit your PATH to include your home directory, or reference this directly.

wget ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware/intel/10/sudo-1.8.1p2-sol10-x86-local.gz

copy sudo-1.8.1p2-sol10-x86-local.gz to server

scp sudo-1.8.1p2-sol10-x86-local.gz user@server:/tmp/

ssh to server

su — to root

cd /tmp
gunzip sudo-1.8.1p2-sol10-x86-local.gz
pkgadd -d sudo-1.8.1p2-sol10-x86-local
	answer 'all' and 'y' to the install questions
ln -s /usr/local/etc/sudoers /etc/sudoers
ln -s /usr/local/bin/sudo /bin/sudo
ln -s /usr/local/bin/sudoedit /bin/sudoedit

Finally, edit /etc/sudoers to add any users or groups to sudo privileges. The root user is already in there. Just add your own username below. There are more maintainable ways to control sudo rights, like a wheel group, but that is well documented elsewhere.

##
## User privilege specification
##
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
jsmith  ALL=(ALL) ALL