Two ways to change Oracle passwords with Ansible

We do our share of database cloning for various purposes and usually the cloning process is fairly scripted. However lately we have been looking more and more into Ansible which as per their site is simple automation/orchestration tool. (Not so sure about simple!) Recently there has been also lot of presentations on automating your Oracle infrastructure…

Oracle Open World & Intelligent Bot Service

Past week I attended Oracle Open World in San Francisco. I hadn’t been there for last 7 years so it was good to see lot of familiar faces there again. Still what comes to conference itself there are always good presentations but the percentage for hit & miss sessions is a lot higher compared to…

Looking deeper into ChatOps

Wow few upgrades and summer vacation kept me busy past few months. Lately I have been looking on automation and started to look into ChatOps. So what is ChatOps? If you look from various sources you get different explanation but to put it really simple you have a chatroom tailored for specific group, be it…

Passbolt v1.6.0 is out

Since I’ve written earlier about Passbolt as team password manager I thought it would make sense to notify there is new version 1.6.0 out as I installed version 1.4.0 for us. My earlier post about Passbolt is here: https://finnishingthoughts.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/passbolt-for-team-password-management/ The biggest thing we noticed previously was the lack of group management in Passbolt but luckily…

Oracle VM 3.4.x & PVM vs HVM PV

Initially when we started to use Oracle VM we did lot of performance testing and at that point we went with Paravirtualized VM’s (PVM) due to better performance we saw with them. Now with our recent upgrade to Oracle VM 3.4.2 if you are using hugepages (we do!) then hugepages are not supported anymore with…

Oracle VM 3.4.2 CPU pinning & licensing

One of the reasons why we started using Oracle VM was due to Oracle’s licensing policy with their products running on top of Oracle VM. If you “pin” (or hard partition) the virtual machine to specific cores you don’t need to license whole server pool which the virtual machine runs on. Drawback is when you…

Resize backup LVM on Exadata

We were patching Exadata and one of the YUM pre-checks failed due to invalid LVM size. We hadn’t done any resizing lately so I think issue had been there already but for whatever reason it wasn’t noticed. For backing up and rolling back on OS updates Exadata takes snapshot on identical LVM volume as the…