I was recently engaged in an effort to get my home RAC up and running. My
hardware isn't all that great, it's a desktop with 4GB RAM and plenty of
(local) disk space. I am running Fedora because, in addition to being a
database and web server, this is also my entertainment center, with my
entire CD collection on it.
The first idea was to try and run RAC locally on FC14. It was
unsuccessful because of the OCFS2 problems. The software on F14 just
wasn't working. I was finally successful with F15 which contains a
working version of OCFS2. Now that this was done, I got ambitious and
started thinking of ASM and that brought me to the topic from the title.
There was a lot of excitement when Oracle decided to drop the support for
raw devices entirely in 12g, but Fedora dropped it in version 10. It is
not possible to create raw devices on any Fedora later than FC9. Also,
ASMLib is not supported for any Fedora Core after FC6. In other words, ASM
cannot be used on FC10 and later because ASM will not take normal block
device. It reports "illegal disk type".
The last Linux version on which I was able to create raw devices was RHEL
5.7, in its CentOS incarnation. The venerable /etc/sysconfig/rawdevices
which has made things unnecessarily easy for the administrators is now
gone. The Oracle's decision to de-support character raw devices was in
fact a Linux decision. They're also experimenting with replacing /sbin/
init. In FC14 and Ubuntu, there is unfinished and undocumented POS called
"Upstart". FC15 and FC16 have something completely different called
"systemd", documented even less than "Upstart". Of course, they broke
away with chkconfig, so the old utilities like chkconfig now offer only
limited functionality. Upstart is now in RHEL 6. You can all be looking
forward to "and now something completely different", Linux style.
Linux is, for some reason, trying to break away from the Unix
compatibility in a major way. I am not really satisfied by the result.
Linux is taking away control from the administrators, introducing the
major new features without properly documenting them and removing the
features that have been in use for a very long time. I don't even want to
mention the new GNOME and Unity interfaces which I have both ditched in
favor of Xfce. I have to confess being less and less satisfied with
Linux. I am not so sure that open source is a good idea. Sufficient
number of bozos can destroy even the good things. Nothing is safe from
morons, not even the work of Ritchie, Thompson and Kernighan. Linux looks
like a moronization of Unix.
I am not at all convinced that Oracle is doing a good thing by releasing
their own distribution. Maybe they should have joined the BSD camp? It
was probably a decision of financial nature, not a technical one.



--
http://mgogala.byethost5.com

Mladen:

# I am not at all convinced that Oracle is doing a good thing by
releasing their own distribution. Maybe they should have joined the
BSD camp?

Ahh ... sorta/kinda like Occupy BSD?

All my systems are now up at OL 5.7 and doing quite well thanks.
Don't have any active plans for 6.x yet ...

On Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:54:25 -0800, John Hurley wrote:


Not quite. My understanding of the "Occupy" movements doesn't have much
to do with the technical merits. I'm not really a fan of that movement
without a message, but I don't think that's comparable with this
situation at all.

My point was twofold:
1) The decision to de-support raw devices was Linux driven, it wasn't
some marketing whim by Oracle Corp. Linus Torvalds is more
probable culprit than Larry Ellison.
2) Red Hat 6.x and derivatives leave much to be desired and have very few
advantages over RH 5.x

The only real advantage of OL 6.x is the possibility of I/O accounting.
Commands like "iotop" and "perf" are not available in kernels before
2.6.20. That's another brilliant characteristic of Linux: it was an
enterprise level OS without I/O accounting. BTW, Ext4 is also a piece of
work: extent based file system without defragmenter. It is not possible
to do something like this for Ext4 file system:

[root@medo mgogala]# xfs_fsr -v /home
/home start inode=0
ino=2925526
extents before:4 after:1 DONE ino=2925526
ino=2925527
extents before:4 after:1 DONE ino=2925527
ino=2947655
ino=2947655 already fully defragmented.
ino=2947667
extents before:2 after:1 DONE ino=2947667
ino=272245176
extents before:2 after:1 DONE ino=272245176
ino=809065277
ino=809065277 already fully defragmented.
ino=809065296
extents before:2 after:1 DONE ino=809065296
[root@medo mgogala]#


When the machine is used for virtual machines and databases,
defragmentation becomes critical because fragmentation will turn your
sequential I/O read into random I/O operations, thus destroying the I/O
performance and your virtual machine performance. XFS is, of course, a
separate option on RHEL and has to be paid separately.
--
http://mgogala.byethost5.com

On Nov 19, 2:34*am, Mladen Gogala <gogala.mla... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
I'm not sure about RHEL, but XFS is included in Oracle Linux 6x. For
free, if I'm not mistaken.

Matthias

On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:59:31 -0800, mhoys wrote:


Here is the part:
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/add-ons/s...le_system.html

and here is the pricing information:
http://tinyurl.com/6p4gsf2

Red Hat is still the most popular variety and after a recent wave of
Oracle license auditing, it is likely to stay that way for a while. There
is all kind of weird stuff going on. Red Hat is actively disabling OCFS2
in their kernels (Fedora has a working version of OCFS2) and Oracle made
ASMlib a ULN subscription only software. There is apparently a small war
being fought right now.


--
http://mgogala.byethost5.com

Joel:

#*I wonder if Larry and Steve ever went on a walk and talked about BSD
v. Linux?

Ahhh so ... probably it was Steve who got Larry to put the penguins up
on stage at OOW?

Man that guy was even trickier than I was aware ( I also recently
finished the book ).

Remember Larry did not want an operating system ... and then this walk
that Joel is conjecturing ... and a veritable operating system
shopping spree started!

Maybe ... just maybe ... this walk was done crossing the same street
the beatles crossed at abbey road?

On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:34:29 -0800, John Hurley wrote:

Was it the Sesame Street?



--
http://mgogala.byethost5.com

On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 17:59:42 +0000, Mladen Gogala wrote:

I found the official price list:
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/purchasing_guide.html



--
http://mgogala.byethost5.com

On Nov 21, 6:34*pm, John Hurley <hurleyjo... (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote:
Or a boat on a river, with tangerine dreams and marmalade skies.

jg
--
@home.com is bogus.
http://www.lemoda.net/people/jeremy-...son/index.html

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:06:51 -0800, joel garry wrote:


There are other starting wit he letter "O". Who cares about the other
things? O is for Oracle, that's good enough for me!



--
http://mgogala.byethost5.com