What CentOS version is installed?

Curious about the CentOS version installed on one of our servers.  With my UNIX Administrator unavailable at the time, I used Google to get my answer.

# cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 5.3 (Final)

Some additional information in the references below.

References
How To Determine CentOS or Red Hat Version
What version of RedHat Enterprise/CentOS am I currently running?

Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP®)

Seems these past few years I have been performing more duties as an IT Operations Manager than as an Oracle DBA. Not a bad situation personally in terms of career growth.

One of my many responsibilities as an IT Operations Manager is to represent my IT department in Client audits and to support the business unit’s ISO 9001:2008 certification. This means maintaining an IT SOP with most of the topics revolving around information security.

This provided curiosity into the various security certifications and how those certifications might align with my current position and future growth.  Seems these days and into the foreseeable future obtaining additional knowledge in information security is a smart choice, even if it’s not your primary responsibility.  Regardless of your IT job description, information security has some level of importance to you and certainly to the your employer.

One security certification that perked my interest was the ISC² SSCP® – Systems Security Certified Practitioner with this description on their web site.

“With as little as one year’s work experience in the information security field, you can become certified as a Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP®).

This is also the perfect course for personnel in many other non-security disciplines that require an understanding of security but do not have information security as a primary part of their job description. This large and growing group includes information systems auditors; application programmers; system, network and database administrators; business unit representatives, and systems analysts.“

James D. Murray blogs about “The SSCP Certification Experience” which I found very informative as he details the process.  He also documents his CISSP experience with “The CISSP Certification Experience” and “The CISSP Certification Experience: My Study Plan“.

Another perspective can be found on the Global Knowledge blog entitled “SSCP Certification“.  From the CISSP perspective, blog entries “CISSP Exam Experience” and “Preparing for the CISSP Exam” are informative as well.

For now I will digest and analyze this SSCP certification information and continue to evaluate the advantages in my IT career path.

WebLogic Express Edition Discontinued

I was notified yesterday by a colleague that Oracle will no longer be selling WebLogic Server Express Edition as of June 1, 2009.

What about a public announcement from Oracle regarding this event?  I can’t find one.  In fact, the response I was given is Oracle has made no public statement about the discontinuance and they do not intend to do so.   Oracle is handling it on a case by case basis when customers request quotes or information.  However, Oracle will continue to support WebLogic Server Express Edition for the next 9 years.

We use WebLogic Server Express Edition because it provided a more cost effective solution and we didn’t need the full functionality and higher cost associated with WebLogic Server Standard Edition.

According to the Oracle Online Store (http://oraclestore.oracle.com), WebLogic Server Standard Edition is licensed at $200 per named user or $10,000 per processor.  At the moment it is unclear to me regarding the Named User Plus minimum requirements.  I will need to talk to an Oracle Rep.

If I recall correctly, a WebLogic Server Express license was around $800 per processor.  One will expect to pay 10x more when comparing that to Oracle’s $10,000 per processor cost.

Anyway, just wondering if anyone else is aware of and/or affected by WebLogic Sever Express being discontinued.

Oracle 10.2.0.4 memory corruption

Thanks to a September 23, 2008 Oracle-L post by Jesse Rich, I was notified of a memory corruption problem in 10.2.0.4 Patch 5 and above.

According to Metalink Note 737957.1, the “problem is introduced by the fix of Bug 5386874 in 10.2.0.4, Patch 5.”  Additional information found in the Note:

If the move to Patch 5 or higher has been made and there is no option to revert back to the situation before applying, then the following workaround can be considered:

“event=”10049 trace name context forever, level 2″
# memory protect KGL objs

Do NOT set this event at session level. Only set it in the init.ora / spfile.

It is not possible to get the corrected fix into Patch 9.  The corrected fix is anticipated for Patch 10 but this cannot be guaranteed at the time of writing.

I forgot about this for a couple of months  when I decided to check again.  On November 6, 2008, the same note was updated with:

It is now confirmed that the correct fix is indeed made available into Patch 10.

Upon further investigation, it appears 10.2.0.4 Patch 12 (Patch 7522473) is the most recent patch available for 32-bit Windows.

Oracle10g ORA-27300 error

My Oracle10g (10.2.0.4 Standard Edition) database running on Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition SP2 with 3GB of RAM was intermittently encountering the errors below in the alert.log:

Thu Oct 02 13:06:09 2008
Process startup failed, error stack:
Thu Oct 02 13:06:09 2008
Errors in file i:\oradba\admin\stad101\bdump\stad101_psp0_7268.trc:
ORA-27300: OS system dependent operation:CreateThread failed with status: 8
ORA-27301: OS failure message: Not enough storage is available to process this command.
ORA-27302: failure occurred at: ssthrddcr

In addition, a corresponding error was found in the Windows Event Viewer:

Unable to begin another thread.

Searched Google using “unable to begin another thread” and found a discussion on the OTN Discussion Forum mentioning the /3GB switch.

More information on how to set this switch in this Microsoft Technet article.  Some in-depth information about the /3GB switch from Ask the Performance Team.  Amit Bansal provides some insight on AWE at AskDba.org.

The plan right now is to set the OS switch and reboot the server.  We’ll see if this resolves the problem.  My initial thoughts are positive from what I have read and when this error occurs.  I will update this blog entry once I have a more definitive result.

References
DBASupport.com Forum – Calculate Size of PGA

Update (24-Oct-2008)
The Oracle instance has been running for two weeks now since we set the /3GB switch.  We have yet to encounter any errors as previously mentioned.