Show full process name / path / string in Solaris using ps

Posted by David Yahalom under Solaris

Let’s say you have a JAVA process running on an old Sun Solaris machine. You want to see the full path of the process running including any run-time variables that were passed to it.

Using ps -eaf | grep -i java gives us this:

[root@hostname ~]# which ps
/bin/ps

[root@hostname ~]# ps -eaf | grep -i java

nobody  4589  4588   0 14:26:35 ?           0:21 /usr/java1.4/bin/java -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xms200m -Xmx300m org.apache.jse

As you can see the process name is trimmed and you can’t see all parameters passed to Java. No matter what parameters or scripting you’ll try and do, using /bin/ps (default) will crop your process name.

There is, however, an entriely different ps program we can use.

[root@hostname ~]#/usr/ucb/ps -auxwww | grep -i java

nobody    4589  0.1  4.228480842528 ?        S 14:26:35  0:21 /usr/java1.4/bin/java -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xms200m -Xmx300m org.apache.jserv.JServ /jserv/etc/jserv.properties

Fantastic!

Limelight

Posted by David Yahalom under Security, Oracle

I would like to thank the several people that have emailed me about this. Pete Finnegan, who is one of the most prominent figures in the world of Oracle databases and Oracle Security has mentioned AuthorityBase on his web site!

He has a writeup mentioning the Oracle Security presentation I’ve created for my company (XpertOne1) and he seemed to liked it.

Check it out at Pete’s site!

Intermittent ORA-12545 When Trying To Connect To RAC Database

Posted by David Yahalom under RAC, Oracle

Well, got another RAC tidbit for you today. I’ve been doing some very interesting RAC installations in the past few weeks and came across several “bugs” (or “random features” in Oracle-tongue ) I felt like sharing.

So, you have a brand new 10g RAC cluster installed and when you try to connect using OCI (probably JDBC thin as well) only to recieve intermittent ORA-12545 errors. The client will connect fine every other attempt or so.

This error happens when you enable server side load balancing but the client does not have domain address / DNS search function setup (or valid /etc/hosts file) so it cannot translate a hostname to a proper IP address.

The solution is simple, make sure that the client from which you are trying to connect is able to resolve all the hostnames in your RAC installation. Either via registering the nodes in a DNS server or by updateding the /etc/hosts file (remember, Windows also has an /etc/hosts file under <WINDOWS>\system32\drivers\etc\hosts).

I’ve seen many DBAs forget that for server-side LOB you need to be able to resolve each cluster node hostname from the client EVEN when you only use IPs in your TNSNAMES.ORA entries. Even without server-side LOB, it’s good practice to be able to resolve RAC hostnames from the client.

This isn’t actually a bug, it’s by-design and if you understand they way server-side LOB works in RAC you’ll see why the client has to be able to resolve RAC hostnames to IP addresses.

Ora-12520 When listeners on VIP in 10g RAC Setup

Posted by David Yahalom under RAC, Oracle

A few days ago I’ve stumbled across an annoying problem with Oracle 10.2.0.1 (yep, need to patch it) RAC causing my OCI client fail to connect with an ORA-12520 error (ORA-12520: TNS:listener could not find available handler for requested type of server ).

Everything was configured correctly on both the server side and the client.

1. Remote_Listener parameter is set to an alias which is defined in the Tnsnames.ora file on both the nodes.
2. The hostname is setup correctly in the tnsnames.ora file.
3. The IP address, VIP and hostname are all properly configured in /etc/hosts on all nodes.

This is a documented Oracle bug with a complete note on this in Metalink (342419.1). 10g RAC instances have a problem where the instances are not registering themselves correctly with the virtual IP address. They get registered to the real ip address where the listener is not listening.

The workaround is very simple:

Define a LOCAL_LISTENER entry for each node in the node’s local TNSNAMES.ORA file:

LISTENER_NODE_XXX =
(ADDRESS_LIST =
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = <node1-vip>)(PORT =1521))
)

Then issue the following command in the sqlplus prompt:

sql>Alter system set LOCAL_LISTENER= 'LISTENER_XXXX' scope=both sid='SID1'.

Remember to do the same for all other nodes in the cluster (each node should have an entry in its TNSNAMES.ORA file with the LISTENER_NODE_XXX definition + setting the LOCAL_LISTENER spfile parameter to the same TNSNAMES.ORA entry).

Simulate load on your linux server using a one-liner

Posted by David Yahalom under Unix, Linux, General IT

Yesterday I needed a quick way to simulate load on a Linux sever. I wanted to find out that my monitoring system is working and sending alerts.

While there are many many tools that can do this, all I needed was a simple bash one-liner shell script that can make the CPUs beg for mercy.

What I ended up using is this:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=100M | gzip | gzip -d | gzip | gzip -d | gzip | gzip -d > /dev/null &

Send a few of these babies to the background and you’ll start seeing smoke coming from your server soon enough.