Raimi war hier

Funny. Due to missing exposure and a "comment" feature there is not much feedback I get for this blog. The entry that triggered most of it yet, is this one about an unsolvable Oracle/PHP problem.

So for the both of you that had the same problem, the archives and the search index: Should your OCI8 client program hang for no reason with the 10.2.0.1 client: downgrade. I solved it by downgrading to 10.1.0.4 but this known bug is supposedly fixed in 10.2.0.2 but I did not test it. Thanks for the feedback, guys.

Call off the rescue team, I made it out alive. Question: How do you make Oracle 10g R2 (Enterprise Database) run on Debian GNU/Linux on AMD64, a system that is not mentioned in the "Certify" certification matrix. Short answer: You dont.

Long answer: You make it believe it runs on a certified host. As mentioned below, the original approach was to just try run it on Debian install missing old libraries until a fixpoint is reached. Since the "leading enterise database" heavily relies on an unhealthy mix of 32- and 64-bit libraries, binaries and java interpreters this turned out to be hopeless (at least on a pure 64-bit system Debian still is). Going 32-bit didnt sound good with all the hassle I was about to start.

I chose SLES9 (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9) as the sandbox system for the Oracle because I used to use SuSE once uppon a time when Linux was all new to me (so no, I dont like Red Hat either). Boy, am I glad I switched to a sane distro years ago. I wouldnt stand SuSE anymore. Unfortenately my fine Opterons are not good enough for 64-bit guests in a vmware. So I went for Qemu to emulate a 64-Bit machine on my 64-Bit machine and (painfully) installed SLES9 into it. This took almost a day with Qemu being a little slilly with its command line arguments and SuSE being a major PITA doing anything.

Running the oracle's OUI inside Qemu resulted in a segfault, so I copied the root filesystem out of the emulated machine to /sles9 getting a 64-Bit chroot jail to run SuSE. Originally I wanted to do this after Oracle ran. Both the host OS and the guest have the oracle users/groups in common, this simplyfies things. Now, inside this chroot (or rather schroot) jail I just ran the installer without any problems. Really, without _any_ problems, which is totally new to me. Of course, I had to (yet again) guess which programs to invoke in my init scripts to automatically start the listener, the db itself, the enterprise manager and the isqlplus thingie. But I expected that.

So what do I gain (after bind-mounting /proc any other imported filesystems into the jail)? My custom 64-bit kernel running my dear Debian host and a SLES9 jail which doesnt even know it's not running as the primary OS. Cool, best of all worlds.

Now, go do that with your toy OS :)

As you can see, if you want to steal a bicycle, first try to rip the lock apart before doing any sophisticated stuff. This is what happened when I last tried to secure my bike.

Oddly enough I can pretend the same level of security by obscurity by just stuffing the broken end back where it came from. I hope this buys me enough time to get a new lock. On the other hand, nobody tried to steal this fine bike for a couple of years now.

I dont get it, really. I was about to install Oracle 10g (10.2.0.1) on a Debian amd64/x86_64 system.. I was yet again so foolish to assume that this would just work. Sure, the compatibility list doesnt mention Debian, but it never does and it usually works anyway. The restriction to a specific distribution is both insane and useless. But this time they're really into it.

Once i thought Oracles Universal Installer (OUI) was a neat idea - it's written in Java and would work cross-platform. They screwed up by shipping their own ancient/broken dynamically linked JRE without shipping the ancient libraries it is linked against. Oh wait, it's actually 1.4.2. But hey, it's the 32-bit JRE - oh boy, am I lucky I downloaded 700MB of x86_64-specific software. Damit, just let me use my own JRE and we both can be fine! It's the entire point of platform independent software to let the user supply the platform and stop wild-guessing what I might have.

Sidenode: Some years ago I tried to install Oracle 9 on a windoze host - the JRE failed because the then-shipped ancient JRE couldnt make sense of my then-new P4 CPU. Deleting the b0rked symantec JIT dll file made it work then. I guess this was a warning shot.

Now, for a brief moment I considered hacking the installer so that it would use my own JRE but then I found this Debian- Ubuntu-related bug that instantly crushed all my hopes.

My current plans involve secretly torturing Larry E. by installing both him and the 10g in my 32-bit chroot jail. I somehow have the feeling the DB kernel wouldnt take advantage of any 64-bit features anyway :)

If I dont report back on tuesday, please send a rescue team.

Hui, wie gemein. Aber komisch, dass es nicht schon viel mehr Opfer gab...

My family of hardware (running Linux) got extended by an (old) Sony VAIO PCG-SR21K (or PCG-3316 as printed on the bottom) called bob.

Installing was a little tricky because the Debian (and Ubuntu) installers dont come with the kernel modules required to access the externel PCMCIA CD-ROM drive. So I booted from the CD and used a Memory Stick (tm) to access the netinst image. As a side effect I could insert the PCMCIA network card for the netinst (there is only one PCMCIA slot).

Bob himself is cute. The hard disc is surprisingly fast and the display at 1024x768 is terrific for its size. CPU performance is within expected range and the S3 savage chip accellerates enough for full-screen video (I just love mplayer).

Now for the stuff that really matters: With this hint i got Speedstep working: speedstep_smi.smi_cmd=0x82. This project has a kernel driver and command line tools (spicctrl) that work with the Fn key and Jogdial. Making the dial generate mouse events works already and the Fn keys trigger their respective events. What I am lacking is something nice (and not X-related) to poll for these events and perform suspend operations. This wouldnt be too hard since acpitool -s sends the machine to sleep just fine. But when it wakes up, the TFT backlight is not turned on. So this is what I'm lacking.

PS: The built-in speakers suck and the thing gets really warm. Seems the reported 47 to 70 degree celsius are completely transported to my lap.