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February 23, 2007
Wire Pullers R Us
The physical plant networking infrastructure is getting some attention this week. Bill Nix from Telcom is here pulling wires. So far, he has added the Mechanic's Office, Carpenter Shop, and Machine Shop onto the network. Today he is working on Dave Morris' office. Soon we should also have Stores and a few other offices all upgraded.
It turns out that a lot of the Physical Plant's wiring is pre-cat 3. This wasn't too much of a problem until our new switch was installed and these lines were jacked up to 100 Mb. It was just too much for the old wiring, so a number of users were cut back to 10 Mb just to keep their connectivity. My part is to sit and watch, then hook up the computers and make sure they're happy. Also, this week we added new computers to the Carpenter Shop and Machine Shop. The Mechanic's Office already had a computer, but it wasn't hooked to the network. Now it is.
Pretty soon everyone should have 100 Mb service right to the switch. Thanks, Bill, a very nice job!
Posted by rossm at 1:08 PM | Comments (0)
10gR2 Moves Forward
Yesterday Michael Ellis, Dale, and I worked some more on the 10gR2 upgrade. We were able to log in with the Thin Client in less than 5 minutes - a huge improvement. We actually shut down the AERO instance of 10g, saved the folders we needed, and deleted the rest of the install. We then reinstalled 10gR2 with a SID of TENG. It is our collective opinion that two db's on the same server with the same SID just was not going to work.
Dale handled some maintenance, creating users and importing tables.
Travis made a snapshot of TENG, so our plan is to shut it down and try a restore using the snapshot. We still feel that this is the key thing we must be able to do before putting 10gR2 into production, that is, we must be able to restore the db with the most recent snapshot, then recover it to real time. And, we must be able to do this post haste.
Anyway, we are pushing forward on this project.
Posted by rossm at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)
Hawaii Calls
I have to go to Hawaii for the week of Feb. 26th - Mar 2nd. They are going to make me sit in the sun and go snorkeling and diving. The blogging will resume when and if I come back on March 5th.
For help, please call the UCS Help Desk at 88925.
Aloha!
Posted by rossm at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2007
Playing With 10g
This Thursday, Dale and I met for our Thursday morning staff development time. You know we were anxious to tear into the 10g database and see what we could do. The Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) for 10g is web based, and quite comprehensive. For years I have been trying to get the 9i OEM to run as more than a stand alone, with no luck, and here we have a really nice OEM interface right out of the box.
So far, Dale and I have performed a number of DBA management tasks on the 10g database. We have created several LMT's (locally managed tablespaces), created a bunch of new users, imported some fairly decent sized tables, and dropped and recovered a couple tables using Flashback - another 10g improvement. Starting from scratch it took us less than 5 minutes to restore a dropped table. Very nice!
One other thing we looked at on Thursday was the Metrics section. There is a huge amount of data kept on the database, and it is somewhat confusing, however, we did manage to reset one metric limit to keep it from throwing an alert every two minutes. The metrics area will be a lot more useful once we have a production instance going.
Posted by rossm at 2:44 PM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2007
New InSite Web Site in Place
The WOU Bookstore has moved it's website onto the MBS (Missouri Book Store) servers, using a product called InSite. The new website is faster, cleaner, and much easier to maintain. We are still able to link to our bookstore data, so students can search for textbooks by class. Also, much of the imprinted material - sweatshirts, mugs, etc. - can also be ordered from the website. Although the initial setup for InSite was challenging, the switchover has not resulted in loss of functionality or down time.
Other upgrades on the horizon include a software package for printing forms such as PO's, a new cash register, and a Point of Sale OS upgrade. Never a dull moment at the bookstore!
Posted by rossm at 3:28 PM | Comments (0)
AERO Crashes
Last Tuesday afternoon our production Oracle database crashed. Persons attempting to log in received an error message, and those already logged in lost all functionality. The error message we received was that the maximum number of sessions had been exceeded. However, the database did a core dump and created several trace files at the same time. So, I opened a Service Request with Oracle and sent them the files for review.
It turns out that our database is experiencing a known bug that affects the shared pool. Newer versions of the database don't suffer from this bug. There is a temporary bug fix available, however, the fix could be worse than the bug. At this time, we have decided against applying the bug fix, and are hoping to resolve the issue by simply upgrading to 10g.
Posted by rossm at 3:21 PM | Comments (0)
Oracle 10g Release 2
We are well underway in our efforts to upgrade the WOU production database to Oracle 10g Release 2. Travis has set up a server for us, and we installed the database on it last Friday afternoon. The database is up and running and about four UCS techs have DBA privileges on it.
We have been impressed with the web-based Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM). You can perform virtually all database administration and management tasks from the web interface.
The next steps for us are to install a copy of our production 9i database on Maverick, test and perfect the upgrade process on Maverick, then do the production upgrade.
Posted by rossm at 3:15 PM | Comments (0)