Installing Oracle 11 XE on Ubuntu 10.10 or 11.04, 64-bit

2
9 months ago
by uncommonguy in ,

Ora­cle recently released the XE ver­sion of Ora­cle 11 specif­i­cally for Ubuntu 64-bit. These instruc­tions and an auto­mated script will get it up and run­ning in just a few min­utes.
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Call before digging, or curse after digging…made my choice.

0
10 months ago
by uncommonguy in

You know those ad spots from the power com­pany about "call before you dig"? And the mag­nets? And the warn­ings on the monthly bill? Well, I ignored all that and just cut a cable while dig­ging. Inter­net still works, so guess we didn't need it much. I nicked the other one last month but repaired it. Feel­ing pretty dumb right now.

Solaris troubleshooting

2
10 months ago
by uncommonguy in

Some quick notes that I will expand at some point. This is based on data requests Ora­cle Sup­ported requested while trou­bleshoot­ing a boot issue on a Sun V440.
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System uptime in Python

0
11 months ago
by uncommonguy in ,

Here is a short recipe to get sys­tem uptime in Python. Tested so far on Ubuntu linux and Solaris. Obvi­ously won't work on Windows.

gist on Github for sys_uptime.py

import subprocess

def uptime():
    raw = subprocess.check_output('uptime').replace(',','')
    days = int(raw.split()[2])
    if 'min' in raw:
    	hours = 0
    	minutes = int(raw[4])
    else:
    	hours, minutes = map(int,raw.split()[4].split(':'))
    totalsecs = days*24*60*60 + hours*60*60 + minutes*60
    return totalsecs

print 'System uptime of %d seconds' % (uptime())

How to Configure NTP in Solaris 10

0
11 months ago
by uncommonguy in

This is a sim­ple work­ing con­fig­u­ra­tion method posted in the com­ments of this page. The page is offline but I found it in Google Cache and ver­i­fied that it works. Repost­ing it here for posterity.

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Setting my own priorities. And griping.

0
11 months ago
by uncommonguy in

When a man­ager requests the "urgent upgrade" of some test­ing servers to the lat­est and great­est ver­sion and it quickly becomes clear none have been used since orig­i­nal install 15 months ago, expect me to say "sure" and then go do actual work instead.

Fixing sendmail error "[ID 702911 mail.crit] My unqualified host name unknown; sleeping for retry"

0
11 months ago
by uncommonguy in

This prob­lem annoys the heck out of me, and appar­ently thou­sands of other Solaris admins. I can't imag­ine the rea­son some­one thought send­mail should log this error every few min­utes about the stu­pid host­name, but must have been a good one because the app sure is adamant about it.

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On project managers

1
11 months ago
by uncommonguy in

Brain teaser of the day: There are 3 project man­agers on a project. How many of them and how many times do I have to ask each of them a sim­ple ques­tion to get a use­ful answer?

Answer: 6 emails and 1 phone call. 5 total queries is the best expected solu­tion. My analy­sis from expe­ri­ence indi­cates if there are 2 project man­agers, effec­tive knowl­edge is lim­ited but acces­si­ble. At 3 man­agers it is nearly zero. At 4 and above it is actu­ally neg­a­tive because you get between n and 2n answers and the answers get stu­pider the more des­per­ate you are.

Fol­lowup: Think­ing I should escape go join the French For­eign Legion.

Dis­claimer: Of course I know there are good and great project man­agers. I sup­pose the ones I deal with are mostly ade­quate and maybe even sat­is­fac­tory. Some­times I just find the actual project events com­pletely inex­plic­a­ble assum­ing a con­scious human is pay­ing any atten­tion. The past week has just been a night­mare of con­fu­sion and stress.

Preparing for the Rapture

0
12 months ago
by uncommonguy in

To my friends and fam­ily: I'll be explod­ing 7 hours ahead of you dur­ing Saturday's Rap­ture. I'll save some seats in case we end up in the same place. If the bot­tle of gin I taped to my thigh makes it with me, we'll have quite a party.

To my wife: If we end up in dif­fer­ent places after this Rap­ture thing, remem­ber me as I am: a tall, slim, muscle-y armed god of a man who fights crime anony­mously and secretly engi­neered the return of Fam­ily Guy and Futu­rama and sold a fake Dali of my own cre­ation to the Guggen­heim and gave all the pro­ceeds to orphans. I love you.

To the peo­ple I didn't like: You are defi­cient as a human being. It was def­i­nitely you.

Good riddance to bad rubbish

1 year ago
by uncommonguy in

The "every life is sacred" crowd is wrong. Soci­ety has to pro­tect itself from the worst of its mem­bers. Laws and the judi­cial sys­tem are for nor­mal crimes like theft and mur­der. For crimes on a society-killing scale, we need swift sharp action. You don't treat a flesh-eating virus like a paper cut — you excise the area as fast as pos­si­ble, breathe a sigh of relief, and get back to life. Cheers to every­one who worked toward killing Bin Laden.

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