Last week our VOIP team upgraded our Cisco Call Center server for 7.x to 8.x. This move required the migration of the database from its previous MSSQL server to an IBM Informix database. For a while now, our business intelligence department has reported off of the call information recorded in this database to gather statistics about the call center’s performance.

After years of dealing with software companies you would expect that I would have grown callus to the way of things. The general lack of planning and design that many put into their products still astounds me. The lackadaisical approach to maintenance and product enhancements confounds me. Why do we purchase and implement products with such obvious over site?

Currently we are in the process of setting up Oracle Identity Management at the University. 3 databases are being configured for development, testing/qa, and of course production. Our other 15+ instances are running RHEL4 64bit with Oracle 10.2.0.4, so this will be the first RHEL5 64bit install we've done for Oracle.

I recently ran into problems starting services after completing setup of a new 64bit development enviornment for Blackboard 8. The rpms installed the 32bit version of apache and it was missing one of the libraries. Gdbm to be more specific.

It was easy to see the problem by doing an ldd on httpd:

[root@lubba01dev bin]# ldd httpd
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)

This Thursday, Seth Sites and I are presenting at the Virginia Oracle Users Group in Richmond, Virginia. The topic covers our recent migration of a 4-node Oracle RAC from an EMC CX700 onto NFS on a NetApp. We are covering the different steps we took in migrating the ASM, OCR and voting disk in addition to topics like: mount options, benefits/consideration, warnings and suggestions.

It’s usually a good idea to schedule regular refreshes of a development (dev) sql server from the production(prod) version. Ideally, the prod environment is secured from everyone except an isolated number of systems administrators requiring dev to be kept as close to the live version as possible.

I recently migrated from a homemade website to the drupal content management system (CMS). It has been a great experience thus far. Drupal is feature rich but doesn’t clutter up the interface by default. It's extensibility comes in the form of modules which are written by endusers and enthusiests.

We performed 2 big upgrades to our production Blackboard environment last week. We had been running 7.0 for almost 2 years, but it was time to upgrade to 7.3. The upgrade path was pretty straightforward except for the use of hot fixes in place of the base application pack.

While working in a development environment I came across the need to setup a clustered oracle home (Db_2) on a box with an existing single instance (Db_1). After the cluster ready services (crs) completed and I ran through the db setup I went to run netca to setup the clustered listeners. Unfortunately, the creation of the listener failed with an odd CRS error message.

I ran into a problem while attempting to apply the April 2008 Critical Patch Update. We have a 4 node RAC cluster running 10g R1. I dropped the first node out of the cluster by shutting down the instance on the first node and stopping the node apps using srvctl. The OPatch utility was patched to the requird 1.0.0.0.57 and added to the path.