Wheeew, I am now a RedHat Certified Engineer! 5

A couple of weeks ago, RedHat announced the general availability of RHEL6… also effective on this release is the change on their certification offering. RHCT will now be replaced by RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator), and if you would like to be RHCE on RHEL6 regardless of your certification on RHEL5 you still have to go through the RHCSA exam.. and then once you pass.. you are then allowed to take RHCE exam for RHEL6. More details here: RHCSA, RHCE

Since my self study modules/materials are on RHEL5, and it would take a while for the RHEL6 exam to come out and of course to review on that version.. and it’s really one of my personal goals to be RHCE asap! why not just take the RHEL5 RHCE? so I inquired, the exam center said the last RHCE exam for RHEL5 would be this December. So immediately I reserved and paid for my slot (yeah my own money!).

After OOW, my laptop broke down – data rescue scenario Reply

I just got back in the office from a 2 week conference + vacation (SFO,WAS,NY). Then I was finally back in shape to work and do the usual geek stuff again but suddenly my Neo laptop suddenly stopped working! (the one I mentioned here, but it’s now on Fedora)

It can’t even boot to BIOS, certainly a case worse than BSOD.

RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) is out!!! :) Reply

The company I work for, SQL*Wizard,  is a RedHat Advanced Business Partner so I was lucky to get my hands dirty on the BETA release of RHEV, also a pleasure to work with Siva Shunmugam (Sr. Solutions Architect@RedHat & RHCA). I must say, KVM is so fast… plus the RHEV manager is so cool as a management platform :)

Soon I’ll have some Virtualization related posts about my experiences RHEV-iiinnggg…..

Diagnosing and Resolving “gc block lost” 34

Last week, one of our clients had a sudden slow down on all of their applications which is running on two node RAC environment

Below is the summary of the setup:
– Server and Storage: SunFire X4200 with LUNs on EMC CX300
– OS: RHEL 4.3 ES
– Oracle 10.2.0.3 (database and clusterware)
– Database Files, Flash Recovery Area, OCR, and Voting disk are located on OCFS2 filesystems
– Application: Forms and Reports (6i and also lower)

As per the DBA, the workload on the database was normal and there were no changes on the RAC nodes and on the applications. Hmm, I can’t really tell because I haven’t really looked into their workload so I don’t have past data to compare.