Using LDAP/Centrify with Oracle Grid Control/Enterprise Manager 11g

Posted by on January 26, 2012 No comments

The background for this post is found here

We are currently using Oracle Grid Control 11g to monitor and manage most of our production and development Oracle database and application servers.  When posed with the task of doing some tablespace reorganizations, I opted to embrace the GUI and click my way to what is usually a tedious task.  Unfortunately I hit a brick wall when I needed to enter my user credentials for the host system to do some of the OS level tasks.

In an “ideal” world, there is no such thing as identity management and all of your logins are local to the box that you are interested in working on.  Oh, and you have root access.  In reality, most organizations use some sort of tool like Centrify to allow users a single sign-on for Unix/Linux hosts in their mixed environments.  Unfortunately Oracle Enterprise Manager needs a little help to work with non-local logins.

So how do I make my LDAP login work with OEM when administering remote hosts?  Here is a quick and dirty solution (for Centrify)

Oracle Enterprise Manager does support PAM authentication. To enable PAM authentication, create a file called /etc/pam.d/emagent and include the following lines so the authentication for AD users passes through Centrify PAM modules:
#Centrify mod
auth       sufficient     pam_centrifydc.so
auth       requisite      pam_centrifydc.so deny
account    sufficient     pam_centrifydc.so
account    requisite      pam_centrifydc.so deny
session    required       pam_centrifydc.so homedir
password   sufficient     pam_centrifydc.so try_first_pass
password   requisite      pam_centrifydc.so deny

Note: it is important that these lines be at the beginning of the file – before other lines.

Then restart the Oracle EM agent(s) to reload these directives.

References:

Oracle also has a KB article on this, please check their website for the following article:

How to Configure the Grid Control Agent for PAM and LDAP? [ID 422073.1]

Note the metalink (support.oracle.com) note number (422073.1) above.  Log in over there and get the full run down of making this work.  I don’t want to anger the Oracle gods and post all of the details here, so pay your sales rep and get support if you don’t have it.

Where Will You Find Hadoop Talent? | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com

Posted by on January 26, 2012 No comments

Pretty good article regarding the sharp increase in the need for talented Hadoop people and some tips on getting/building your skill set in hadoop (and big data)

Where Will You Find Hadoop Talent? | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com.

Calculating Table Size on Disk – Oracle

Posted by on January 26, 2012 No comments

This is another no brainer, just here for reference.

SQL> SELECT segment_name tbl, sum(bytes)/(1024*1024) size_MB
     from dba_extents where segment_type='TABLE'
     and segment_name LIKE 'your big tables'
     GROUP BY segment_name;

Calculate Schema Size in Oracle

Posted by on January 26, 2012 No comments

If you are an Oracle DBA and you don’t know how to do this, go find a new job…but for quick reference, here it is:

SELECT sum(bytes)/1024/1024 FROM dba_segments WHERE owner=’YOURMOM’;

check for zombies!

Posted by on January 24, 2012 No comments

I just lost an hour of my life chasing down an issue that could have been avoided.

Back story: having some problems with BI Publisher in a legacy install of OBIEE 10g.  did some port configuration in the Enterprise Manager Console and did some bouncing with opmnctl.  I had some port conflicts (d’oh, fat fingers) and had to force iAS to come up on a non-default port to back out/adjust some of the port changes.  No big whoop.  Then, I tried bringing everything up and saw no errors, EM came up just fine, the apps all had green arrows…but nothing would load.  The browser would just say “waiting” while trying to hit the OBIEE application.  I brought everything down again, and back up again and the same thing happened.  I started digging through the config screens to make sure that I didn’t miss anything.

Then I decided to bring everything down and issue a ps -ef | grep [username] and saw that I had an old sawserver (OBIEE web server) process hanging around.  Killed it…brought everything back up, and we were back in business.

Moral of the story: If you bring everything down to fix a bigger problem, make sure everything is indeed down before bringing the stack back up.

Oracle, Cloudera unveil Hadoop appliance

Posted by on January 16, 2012 No comments

Oracle has partnered with Cloudera to bring Apache Hadoop to its Oracle Big Data Appliance, which the company officially released Tuesday.

The newly released appliance comes with Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), along with the Cloudera Manager software. The rack also comes with a copy of the Oracle NoSQL Database. Oracle announcedthe Big Data Appliance, along with the Oracle NoSQL database, at OpenWorld last September.

Full story here

Loose End Tying: Got my 11g OCP

Posted by on January 16, 2012 No comments

In an effort to knock out some loose ends, I finally took my OCP upgrade test (1Z0-055) from 9i to 11g.  It was tough, but I did pretty well on it.  So as I start to look for ways to find more work with Big Data and open source software…I get my Oracle certification upgraded.  Confused?  Me too.  Just one of those things that I needed to knock off of my plate.

See next post for more Oracle news (involves Hadoop!)

Hadoop and Big Data Coming

Posted by on January 8, 2012 No comments

I’ve been enslaved by RDBMS’s for too long.  Keep an eye out for some interesting posts about Hadoop (Hive, HBase) and other Big Data platforms.  I’ve recently obtained my CCAH (Cloudera Certified Administrator of Apache Hadoop) after a 3 day training course and I’ve also been cheating on Oracle with MongoDB.  Plan on seeing interesting articles and some how-tos in the coming weeks.  Right now, I’m stuffing as much data as I can into my Hadoop cluster at home and in the more distant future, I’ll be learning R and pulling some fancy charts and graphs from it.

Million Song Dataset

Posted by on January 8, 2012 No comments

Looking for some data to feed your demo Hadoop cluster?  Interested in pulling some awesome lists and stats about music?  Here’s a great set of data for you.  Full details at the link below.

via The Echo Nest Taste Profile Subset Million Song Dataset.

Fibonacci Series – Oracle

Posted by on January 3, 2012 No comments

I noticed a Fibonacci Bunnies shirt at Think Geek and got to wondering how to generate a Fibonacci series using a SELECT statement, or at minimum a SQL function.  The SQL function route would be pretty easy…but here are two pretty interesting approaches at it (Oracle):

SQL> select s seq from dual
  2  model return all rows
  3  dimension by ( 0 d ) measures ( 0 s )
  4  rules iterate (&n) (
  5  s[iteration_number ] = decode(
  6  iteration_number, 0, 0, 1, 1, s[iteration_number-2]
  7  ) + nvl(s[iteration_number-1],0)
  8  )
  9  /
Enter value for n: 10
old   4: rules iterate (&n) (
new   4: rules iterate (10) (

       SEQ
----------
         0
         1
         1
         2
         3
         5
         8
        13
        21
        34

10 rows selected.

AND:

SQL> select round ((power ((1 + sqrt (5)) / 2, level - 1) -
power ((1 - sqrt (5)) / 2, level - 1)) / sqrt (5)) fib
from dual
connect by level <=&n;
Enter value for n: 6
old   3: connect by level <=&n
new   3: connect by level <=6

       FIB
----------
         0
         1
         1
         2
         3
         5

6 rows selected.

From:
http://www.club-oracle.com/forums/how-to-generate-fibonacci-series-puzzle-t143/