Author Archives: Roy

Lesson learned: How to kill an Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance

If you’re having a rather dull afternoon at the office, and you happen to have an OVCA as your personal playground, you can always try this little trick to spice up your day: Point your browser to the Oracle VM … Continue reading

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Remove password and watermark from pdf on Ubuntu 14

For this recipe we need ghostscript which is/should be installed by default, as well as pdftk and xpdf-utils: apt-get install pdftk sudo apt-get install xpdf-utils If the PDF is encrypted with a password, remove it using xpdf-utils and ghostscript: pdftops … Continue reading

Posted in Technical, Ubuntu | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Fast Track: ElasticSearch on CentOS 6.x on DigitalOcean VPS

yum install wget cd /opt wget –no-cookies –no-check-certificate –header “Cookie: gpw_e24=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oracle.com%2F; oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie” “http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u67-b01/jdk-7u67-linux-x64.tar.gz” tar xzf jdk-7u67-linux-x64.tar.gz cd jdk1.7.0_67/ alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /opt/jdk1.7.0_67/bin/java 2 alternatives –config java alternatives –install /usr/bin/jar jar /opt/jdk1.7.0_67/bin/jar 2 alternatives –install /usr/bin/javac javac /opt/jdk1.7.0_67/bin/javac 2 alternatives –set … Continue reading

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Installing MediaWiki 1.20.2 with Oracle 11g Express Edition

I encountered and worked around a couple of issues when installing MediaWiki 1.20.2 with Oracle 11g Express Edition 11.2.0.2.0 as the database back-end. The solutions below can be also applied to MediaWiki 1.20.0 and 1.20.1. I did the installation on … Continue reading

Posted in Oracle, PHP, Technical | 1 Comment

Open source software alternatives for Oracle database

Here’s a very short list of open source server software that I have found to run smoothly with an Oracle database back-end. All will work with the free Express Edition. Blog or Photoblog While a bit of an overkill for … Continue reading

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PHP and Oracle on Ubuntu

I always meant to let my php scripts on my Ubuntu server access Oracle databases, thus quite possibly making it into a Linux, Apache, Oracle and PHP server. I do wonder how you would smoothly pronounce the resulting acronym. Anyway, … Continue reading

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Adding an additional listener to ODA

After deploying an Oracle Database Appliance, a standard set of production listeners are configured on bond0. This includes one listener on each of the virtual ip interfaces, and two SCAN listeners. In my environment, I would very much like to … Continue reading

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Restore database to new or redeployed ODA

Doing a restore from an RMAN backup to a freshly deployed Oracle Database Appliance seems like a conceivable scenario, so I figured it would be nice to have tried it at least once. For this test, I have a backupset on … Continue reading

Posted in ODA, Oracle, Technical | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Erase and Rewind – Redeploying Oracle Database Appliance (2.3.0 image)

After using an Oracle Database Appliance for a bit of testing, it was time to get it ready for production. I decided to start with a fresh deploy and re-initializing shared storage. Note that this is the 2.3.0 base image, … Continue reading

Posted in General, ODA, Oracle | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Designing an isolated front production network for ODA

With the introduction of Oracle Engineered Systems the DBA is moved somewhat closer to infrastructure design decisions, and expected to at least have some opinions on the network design requirements for the database. As such, I’ve given some thought to … Continue reading

Posted in ODA, Oracle, Technical | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment