10gR2

Attacks on Oracle Databases Get Even Simpler

Friday, July 24th, 2009

According to this article, an open source tool, Metasploit, is getting new functionality specifically created to infiltrate an Oracle DBMS environment. True, the database version being attacked in the upcoming demo is antiquated (10g rather than 10gR2 or even 11g) but this goes to show that it is critical for Oracle databases to be patched [...]

Issue Installing the Oracle July 2008 CPU

Friday, February 29th, 2008

The threats mitigated by installing the quarterly security patches are numerous. There are also risks involved, in this case specifically the risk that the database will be unavailable after the patch installation until invalidated objects are recompiled.
Here is a snippet from the readme:

Run the view recompilation script. Note that this script is run with [...]

Undersized OCR Device Repercussions

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

What happens when you use a 10 MB raw device to store your Oracle 10.2.0.1 CRS OCR? Assuming that you don’t have a million services, you would never know that your system did not meet Oracle’s minimum platform requirements. That is until you decide to upgrade to 10.2.0.3 and you are stymied when [...]

Please Insert One More Bit

Monday, November 19th, 2007

I just ran into an error while installing the new CPU for October 2007 (Patch #6394981) on RHEL 4 x86_64 so I figured I would share this error to save you the time of figuring out what the problem is. See the full log here.
The errors started after 5-10 minutes of processing and looked [...]

Password Device Fun

Friday, August 31st, 2007

Each Oracle database (or ASM instance) can have a password file associated with it to allow users to connect as a privileged user (SYSDBA) through the listener. Even when connecting from the same host running the instance, you will not be able to make a SYSDBA connection through the listener, if a password file [...]

PRKO-2016 Errors in CRS Clusters

Friday, August 10th, 2007

Oracle CRS clusters contain OCR elements for each entity in the cluster including databases, database instances and listeners. By default, the first listener on each node is called “LISTENER_<hostname>” but the user has the opportunity to change this name during provisioning of the listener. Any value except for that default value results [...]

Key Metalink Notes

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

Everyone has their goto places for information on the Internet for Oracle information, and one of the key sites is Oracle’s support site, Metalink. Sometimes it can be difficult to find useful information on there so I thought it might be helpful to list a few notes I use regularly. You will need [...]

Cluster Verify (cluvfy) is your friend - sort of

Friday, July 13th, 2007

For the simplest way to determine a list of problems with an environment before you try to install Oracle DBMS software, don’t forget about the Cluster Verification Utility (documentation link) which ships with the Clusterware (CRS) media. The best case is once you have your media available on a host, run these commands to [...]

Create Databases Using a Seed

Tuesday, June 26th, 2007

Everyone knows that you can create a database by running the perennial CREATE DATABASE or you could use the DBCA to create a database from scratch, which handles all the ancillary tasks as well. There are some cases where a third option would be useful, for instance if you want to create a database that [...]