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…
Optimizing performance for Oracle VM when using iSCSI storage
We implemented Oracle VM 3.3.2 around two years ago and biggest issue we had was using iSCSI storage having sub-optimal latency and throughput with parallel sessions and high load in our performance tests. In the end this was resolved by linux disk partition alignment and few iSCSI optimizations. Problem After doing the initial Oracle VM installation we started…
Passbolt for team password management
I was thinking recently that we need some tool where we store our team’s passwords for all the different logins we have. Few requirements what I came up with: The server or the password file needs to be hosted on our network There needs to be mechanism to share passwords within specific persons or groups…
Exadata failing RAID HBA card
This is more of informative story what happened to us recently. In the past we had issue with one of the Exadata cell node where the RAID HBA card has failed. After working with support they decided to replace the card and at the same time update the card firmware. That issue was described in detail…
Oracle OVS, Broadcom Netextreme II and 10G network
We recently upgraded our LAN network from 1G to 10G but the Oracle OVS servers network cards showed only 1G link even though the advertised link was 10G. [root@ovs1 ~]# ethtool em1 Settings for em1: Supported ports: [ FIBRE ] Supported link modes: 1000baseT/Full Supported pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link…
Exadata & host_access_control
Although we have quite wide Oracle Linux stack I had not come across with pam_tally2 before we got Exadata. If you haven’t read about it it’s module which takes care of failed logins and locks account after certain number of tries. Every now and then specially after changing the password every three months we ran…
Upgrading Oracle VM 3.3.3 to 3.4.2
Now when we have used demo 3.4.2 for some time without issues I decided to upgrade our sandbox Oracle VM setup from 3.3.3 to 3.4.2 to get experience for the actual production upgrade coming later. We have two installations of Oracle VM. One is sandbox which has some old blade servers acting as OVS and…