Simon Krenger

For OpenShift 4, the upgrade paths are kept in the cincinnati-graph-data repository as YAML files and then exposed via an API.

There is a Red Hat Solution describing how this data can be queried via api.openshift.com and how you can use this data in your automation:

$ curl -sH 'Accept:application/json' 'https://api.openshift.com/api/upgrades_info/v1/graph?channel=fast-4.2&arch=amd64' | jq .

While this data is quite helpful for automation (the Solution also describes helpful queries), it is not very nice to look at the raw data. If you are looking for a graphical presentation of that data, you should check out this wonderful website that is maintained by a Red Hat colleague with hourly generated data: www.ocp-upgrade.net

Working for Red Hat certainly has its perks. One of them being that I have access to all the content from Red Hat University and I am able to take Red Hat exams for free. With these perks come of course some expectations. Customers expect a Red Hat TAM to be knowledgeable on a wide range of Red Hat products, even if they are not directly related to the function of the TAM.

The most common certifications for System Administrators and also for new TAMs are the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) and the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). So after passing my RHCSA exam in December 2019, I passed the exam EX294V8 to become a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) in mid-February. The next step is obviously to become a Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA), in my case focussed on Cloud technologies such as OpenShift and Containerisation.

To prepare for the RHCE, I used Red Hat University Online courses (RH294) and also prepared using Tomas Nevars Ansible Sample Exam. As others have already noted, the RHCE for RHEL8 is a pure Ansible exam, so knowing your Ansible playbooks in and out will help you with the exam. The above courses and sample exam are great preparations for the exam itself.

So here is yet another troubleshooting post. Today I was applying another PSU for an older Oracle 11.1.0.7 database and received the following error after issuing $ORACLE_HOME/OPatch/opatch apply:

The following warnings have occurred during OPatch execution:
1) OUI-67215:
OPatch found the word "failed" in the stderr of the make command.
Please look at this stderr. You can re-run this make command.
Stderr output:
/usr/bin/ld: crti.o: No such file: No such file or directory
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
genclntsh: Failed to link libclntsh.so.11.1
/usr/bin/ld: crti.o: No such file: No such file or directory
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status


2) OUI-67215:
OPatch found the word "failed" in the stderr of the make command.
Please look at this stderr. You can re-run this make command.
Stderr output:
/usr/bin/ld: crti.o: No such file: No such file or directory
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
genclntsh: Failed to link libclntsh.so.11.1
/usr/bin/ld: crti.o: No such file: No such file or directory
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

My quick Google search returned only results that indicated I had to set my LD_LIBRARY_PATH. I already had set this environment variable correctly, so I looked on for more answers. In My Oracle Support document 471745.1 I found that I had to install the package glibc-devel:

When setting up a new server in a highly secured network, one does not always have access to the Red Hat Network to download packages for the installation of the server. Often, a local repository is provided later on in the setup process.

This leaves us with the problem of installing the necessary packages for the Oracle database. Luckily, we can use the DVD we used for the installation of the Operating System to get all required packages.

Well, I was quite busy before the holidays, but here is another post I just keep for my reference.

For each database, I believe it is important to automate database shutdown and database startup. This way, in case of an emergency, a systems administrator can start and stop database services without the need for a database administator. Oracle provides an excellent article on this topic, but the Oracle documentation is quite generic. So I hereby provide a step-by-step guide for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

When deploying a new database, one thing I usually do is to set up a logrotate configuration for the Oracle Listener log. The Oracle Listener logs every connection he makes and when using an Application Server to interface the database, this file can grow quite a bit. So we need to make sure that we properly rotate this log and compress the old logs.

To achieve this, I usually create the following configuration for logrotate:

Using Red Hat with Samba (Version 3.0.10-1.4E.11), I had the problem that Windows Explorer would not refresh properly when browsing the folders served by Samba. When creating a new folder, nothing showed up and it was necessary to manually refresh the Explorer window to see the “New Folder”. The same symptoms appeared with newly created files.

To fix this, add the following line to the [global] section of your smb.conf (usually located under /etc/samba/smb.conf):

[global]
refresh = 1

Sadly, I could not find this parameter in the official Samba manpages. Should anyone have more information or any documentation on this, feel free to let me know.

When I was installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a server, the machine suddenly hung at the following line:

PCI: Probing PCI Hardware (Bus 00)

This is a well-known problem (as a simple search on Google will reveal), so to solve it simply add the following parameter to the kernel boot configuration:

After upgrading a database from 10.2.0.1 to 10.2.0.5, I was unable to start the Oracle Enterprise Manager. Whenever I tried to do so, the log showed that it failed to start Database Control. Even when I deconfigured the Enterprise Manager, deleted the repository and started from scratch, I still ran into the same problem. In this post, I will describe the symptoms I encountered and also provide a solution.

For a startup script, I needed to start JBoss and start another component as soon as the complete JBoss server was started. When you execute the “run.sh” script that comes with JBoss, it immediately exits and starts JBoss in the background (which is quite nice I think). Unfortunately, when I started the other component using this method, the additional program was unhappy, since JBoss was not ready yet. So I had to come up with a trick to delay the start of the additional program.

So with the help of the internet and my co-worker, we came up with the following script: