I grew up during the waning years of the USSR - back when the thought of a nuclear attack was still a concern, but much less likely. America was strong - nobody was really a threat to us, and those who were a threat (the Iran hostage crisis) weren’t really something that everybody worried about. The economy was booming - except for the S&L failure, which didn’t seem to affect my seven year old self or my family at all. The only thing that I noticed from that was that a former bank branch became a Chinese restaurant.

9/11 happened, and the economy slowed. I got laid off from VPI and spent the remainder of the summer and fall in an alcoholic haze with Jay, not doing much besides sending resumes, surfing Monster, and playing paintball in the woods on Fischer Boulevard behind Mugsys. There was the threat of the “next attack on American soil” which sort of hung over like a specter, but even then did not really keep me up at night. I suppose that, had I lived or worked in New York in September of 2001, or had I known anybody who died in the WTC attacks I might have felt differently.

Seven years later there’s still the threat that terrorists pose. We also have Iran which may or may not be building a nuclear device which certainly would be used to attack America. The news today is that North Korea is taking the seals off their reactors and that they don’t care about being labeled a state that supports terrorism. It’s either a negotiating point or another vector of attack for people who don’t like America.

The headlines are all screaming about the economy. Giant banks - the pillars of the American economy - are teetering near collapse. AIG was just bailed out. There’s a $700B plan stalled in Congress to “rescue” the economy that is being drawn up by the same people (Republicans and Democrats) who were incompetent enough to let the country get to this point. My house has lost $50K in equity in the last year. Record numbers of houses are being foreclosed on. Record numbers of people (myself included) are one or two paychecks away from disaster. One of my friends who works construction has been out of a job for a month. There’s the ever present worry that the layoff I had in 2001 will repeat itself in 2008, and I’ll be scrambling to find some way to keep my head above water and pay the $1600/mo or something needed for COBRA.

My daughter is two and a half. She wakes up innocently each day, heads into the living room to play with her toys and watch cartoons. She knows nothing about the people in the world who wouldn’t think twice about blowing her up with a car bomb to make a political statement. She knows nothing about the impending collapse of the economy, the lowering value of the house, or the rising prices of groceries.

I have to wonder if the world is getting more complicated (and dangerous), or if my perception of all of the bad things going on is just increasing as I get older. There hasn’t been a day that goes by in the last two weeks that I haven’t worried about the future - the collapse of the economy, and the very real threat that myself and my family could be homeless and standing on a soup kitchen line with hundreds of other people. I don’t know if I can blame the situation in the world on Bush (which would be a convenient label to stick on everything) or if it’s just the inevitable conclusion of the way things have been headed for generations and generations.

All that I know is that I am terrified of the future.

ssl yes

Which enabled Secure LDAP in RHEL4. In RHEL5 the line needs to be:

ssl start_tls

Incidentally, that line works fine in RHEL4, which means that I can continue using the same config files (and eventually package them up as an RPM or something for when we provision new nodes) across RHEL4 and RHEL5 systems.

Beyond that Chris managed to get two Itanium HPUX servers racked and their console cards configured. He had a nice introduction to Wireshark to get their MAC address, and then arp ping to configure the IP’s. Tomorrow I will work with him to get the VLANs set correctly on the switch uplinks, and then I will have to do something to jog my memory to disable Serviceguard on those two nodes.

They expected (and got) a lot of attendees, so Vonage let them use their parking lots for visitor parking. Vonage’s headquarters are in the old Prudential building on Holmdel Road. It’s on a huge piece of property. Driving in I noticed that they had a softball field to the right, and walking across to get to the event I walked through their soccer field. I’ve worked in startups before, but none of them had so much as a foozball table, let alone a softball or soccer field. The HQ of Vonage seemed very slick from what I saw. I can only imagine what their infrastructure is like. From what I understand, it’s very Solaris heavy.

Anyway, the event was really nice. Highlights were an 1887 Benz Motor-Wagen, recognized as one of the first “cars.” There was also a 1955 Mercedes Gull-Wing, a $500k+ car which I never thought I’d see in person, and a beautiful jet black Buick Lesabre. My first car was a 1969 Buick Skylark, and there’s not quite anything like the classic car smell that some of these things pick up. It’s sort of like the smell that Jaguars or Porsche’s have — something very unique to them.

You can see all of the pics in my gallery, but here’s a quick taste:

Anybody who has ever dealt with real estate will appreciate this.

Anyway, he found that when he powered on a 64 bit guest, VMware would error out complaining that he couldn’t run 64 bit guests on his host. Since the guest OS “sees” the same processor as the host machine, this shouldn’t happen. Fortunately, it’s a simple fix.

Go into the BIOS in the server and go to CPU Features. Make sure that VT (Virtualization Technology) is enabled. It comes disabled by default on the PowerEdge 1950. Reboot the box and your 64 bit guests should boot up happily.

Oracle, on the other hand, suggests that - when you build a Linux server (and we’re speaking in Red Hat specifics here) - you should take the default set of RPMs. A minimal install of RHEL clocks in at somewhere around 700MB. A default install of RHEL works out to be much larger (I want to say around 7GB, but I’m not 100% sure — I know it’s in the multi-GB range) and includes a bunch of things that you wouldn’t want on your Oracle server like a full blown Gnome Desktop, Apache, and Samba Server.

So, what if you decide to do a minimal install of Red Hat, load Oracle, and then add missing dependencies yourself? Well, Oracle’s official answer is that you need to reinstall Linux. They offer this flawed analogy to explain their stance. I will bold some of the more braindead verbage. This comes from Metalink note 376183.1:

All Oracle development, coding, testing, documentation, certification and support experience for Oracle on RHEL is based upon this “foundation” of a “default-RPMs” installation of RHEL AS/ES. In the same way that you would not expect the wood framing for a tudor-style house to fit on a ranch-style concrete foundation, please do not expect the Oracle RDBMS software to successfully install upon a “less-than-default-RPMs” foundation of RHEL AS/ES.

At this point, a common question is “Why can’t I just fix the wrong foundation of Linux that I already have? Why do I have to re-install Linux? Or continuing the analogy above, “Why can’t I just go down to the local hardware store, rent a jackhammer, buy a couple of bags of instant concrete, and MAKE it fit?

The answer is “experience”. In the experience of Oracle Global Support, you will continue to experience an infinite series of “installation” or “patching” or “instructions not working” or “GUI tool” or “stability” problems until you re-build this system. Customers who have tried to “just fix it” invariably spend days and in some cases even weeks of frustration before they just “do the right thing” and re-install the correct foundation of Linux.

You would not allow your concrete contractor to try to MAKE your brand-new house fit onto his mistake. In the same way, do not allow yourself to try to MAKE your brand-new Oracle RDBMS installation fit onto the Linux mistake of a “less-than-default-RPMs” installation. Additional RPMs (beyond any documentation) may be needed if a “less-than-default-RPMs” installation of RHEL AS/ES is performed. Oracle Support Services has no experience to advise you on what these additional RPMs may be.

A more cynical translation of that is that Oracle support is lazy, and doesn’t want to take the time to tell you what packages and libraries are needed to run their product. It’s far easier to tell you to install everything then give you a list of exact prerequisites. Also, you’re probably a terrible systems administrator who wouldn’t be able to install the necessary RPM’s anyway, given our lack of effort at generating a list.

It is absolutely astounding to me that an Enterprise-grade software vendor would not give you a list of packages that are required to install their software on Linux. Interestingly enough, though, the instructions for installing it on Solaris gives you a package by package list of what needs to be installed.