Simon Krenger

After installing the Operating System (in my case usually Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Oracle Enterprise Linux) and configuring all necessary parameters, one has to install the Oracle software. It is usually a good idea to use a response file to do this.

There are a few reasons to use a response file:

There is always something that gets in the way. One problem I regularly stumble upon when installing a new Oracle 11g R2 installation is the following error when I try to start the database:

SQL> startup nomount;
ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

So I keep this post mainly for my own reference when installing a new database on a Linux system.

This error comes up because you tried to use the Automatic Memory Management (AMM) feature of Oracle 11g R2. Well done, but it seems that your shared memory filesystem (shmfs) is not big enough. So let’s look at the steps necessary to enlarge your shared memory filesystem to avoid the error above.

Last week, someone at work approached me, stating that he was unable to log into the web interface of a VMware Server machine. I was shocked to learn that we still had a VMware Server up and running. Then, I tried to log into the web interface myself and received an SSL error as well.

It turns out the machine was standing under someones desk and still had one single VM running. In order to migrate the machine to our ESXi infrastructure and fix the problem, I examined the logs on the server and found this:

To install Windows Servers, we usually prepare our images with nLite, add all our required storage drivers, updates and scripts. Using nLite, we can also use our Volume License Key and automate most parts of our installations.

This way, we can provision new virtual machines within minutes from scratch and provide a minimalistic basic Windows Server installation. Unfortunately, I somehow managed only to include the “US International” keyboard layout and had to manually add the standard “Swiss German” keyboard layout (and all other basic keyboard layouts).

Normally, one would change these settings in the “Regional and Language Options” dialogue. Well, that list looked something like this:

In a script I was working on, the tar command always reported the following error when I tried to extract an archive:

Cannot change ownership to uid 1000 , gid 1000: Permission denied

But I was executing the script as root! The reason for this error to occur turned out to be relatively simple. Hint: It has to do with CIFS.

When working with Windows Server and connecting to a server via Remote Desktop, one might stumble upon the following error message:

Windows Server: The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections

It turns out that even after clicking “OK”, you will not be able to connect to the server and your session will be terminated. But how to fix this problem without physically going to the server?

Here is a screenshot:

In a previous post I showed how to install the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) client for Linux (wmic). In this post, I wish to show a few ways on how to query a Windows-based host using the WMI client.

Using WQL, we can query almost any aspect of the Operating System. Using the available WMI Classes (for example the WMI Win32 Classes), we can easily query performance indicators such as Memory Usage, Disk Usage or the status of a certain process.

With Debian 6, the Debian distribution made the jump to a dependency based boot sequence using LSB tags. So when you update your current Debian installation, you might encounter some problems when your scripts are not properly prepared. Such as the following message:

insserv: script vzreboot: service vzreboot already provided!

The full message reads like this:

On one of our Debian hosts, we use bash scripts and cron jobs to automate certain tasks. One of these bash scripts downloads files from an FTP server and archives them. After upgrading the host machine to Debian 6.0.4, one of the bash scripts suddenly showed warnings:

/srv/foo/bar.sh: line 146: warning: here-document at line 140 delimited by end-of-file (wanted `EOF')

Whoops, so let’s look into it. The change was probably introduced with the new version of bash:

For our courses in linear algebra, we are using the GNU Octave software for numerical computation. Since I am using a MacBook Air for university, I had to install Octave on Mac OS X. I simply followed the steps described here and successfully installed gnuplot and the Octave software package. But when I tried to plot something with Octave, I received the following error message: