Buying marketshare

Ok, I'm way waay late on commenting on the two most recent IT company takeovers .

Sun buys MySQL
Tricky one, I have to honestly say I have a hard time seeing where MySQL fits in to Sun's portfolio.
Sun is one of Oracle biggest partners (the biggest after Dell?) and they are one of the biggest backers of PostgreSQL, then even employee a few of head lead Postgres developers.
Sun has got two options with MySQL, they can either invest a lot of RnD in MySQL and actually turn it in to a really good product. MySQL is without a doubt a product with incredible potential, but is today pretty much a over-sized way to store CSV index files (bit harsh perhaps but hey).
Or they can ride out the profits by selling LAMP-stack boxes and let MySQL sustain itself, I doubt they can make up for the billion dollars they payed for it though.
Oh, and what will Sun make of the (rather evil) closed source MySQL Enterprise Monitor administration product from MySQL. Sun having new closed source software? Errr!

Some advice for sun,
1) Add real constraint support. This is a show stopper for many, and the InnoDB approach isn't good enough. MySQL needs native solid from the ground up constraint support, independent of storage engine, version bla bla. If people don't want the "performance loss" of constraints, don't add the constraints!
2) Sort out proper I/O management, tablespaces, clean partitioning all that stuff. MySQL has improved a lot on this point over the last 12 months. But more work is needed, especially if they are planning on selling MySQL powered Thumpers.
3) 100% solid transactional support. MVCC would be fun. I've seen a few to many transactional problems in MySQL. Some sort of logging/undo/redo system is needed.

On top of that I wouldn't mind a clean hot-backup tool, requires proper transactional support (with something like SCN's etc), 3rd party scripting language support (PgPerl anyone?).

That's about 250.000 RnD hours, go get busy!

Oracle buys BEA
This is most likely very good news. I'm a big fan of the Oracle database (duh) and a fan of Weblogic Application Server.
What I'm not a big fan of is Oracle Application Server (oc4j).
I hope Oracle realize that Weblogic is the superior product and works with Weblogic as the front runner and port oc4j features to Weblogic and not the other way around. I doubt that will be the case though. If not, I hope they don't kill off Weblogic any time soon.

Hmm, that's all for now.

Websphere ND dmgr permission problems

Ran in to a really weird problem with one of our Websphere 6.1 Network deployment setups yesterday and as I couldn't find one single page about the problem in google I thought I'd blog it.
I'm not much of a Websphere admin but managed to fix it after a while.

The problem started when a datasource was updated and all of the sudden all node agents stopped trusting the deployment manager (dmgr). Syncing the nodes failed and hence pretty much everything failed to restart / deploy. Running servers where fine though.
We got this message in the logs:

[1/17/08 13:30:52:020 GMT] 00000028 RoleBasedAuth A   SECJ0305I: 
The role-based authorization check failed for admin-authz operation 
SSLAdmin:temporarilyDisableCertificateAuthentication:java.lang.Long.
The user UNAUTHENTICATED  (unique ID: unauthenticated) was not granted
any of the following required roles: administrator.

My best guess is that node agent configuration was corrupted in some way.
How do you fix the problem then?
Fairly easy actually.
# Stop all node-agents that seem broken (that would probably be all of them!).
# Go to the node agents bin directory on the node (usually something like $WAS_HOME/profiles//bin/).
# Manually sync the node with syncNode.sh, point to the SOAP connector (default is 8879) on the DMGR server. See example

./syncNode.sh dmgrhost 8879 -username websphere -password webfear

# Start the node agent and verify that the logs are happy. Kick off a cell sync from dmgr. You should see entries similar to this in the logs:

[17/01/08 16:14:59:872 GMT] 0000002f NodeSyncTask  A   ADMS0003I: 
The configuration synchronization completed successfully.

Solaris Express on a Toshiba Satellite Pro A200

I bought myself one of those cheap laptops the other month. I needed a small machine for testing and since laptops are just as cheap (if not cheaper) as desktops these days I got a laptop.
The machine came with Vista but I wanted to triple boot Vista, Ubuntu and Solaris Express Community Edition.

• Use diskmgmt.msc in Vista to shrink the partition the machine came with, Windows can do this natively so there is no need to use Partition Magic or similar tools. Create at least three new partitions. One for Solaris, one for Linux and one for Linux swap.
  
• Secondly install Solaris, boot off the CD and go through the basic installer. The widescreen resolution worked out of the box (as usual). Do a full install, spending time "fixing" a smaller installer is just annoying. Solaris will install it's grub boot loader on both the MBR and superblock (on the Solaris partition). It probably makes sense to leave a large slice unused so it can be used with ZFS after the installation is done.
  
• Install Ubuntu. Nothing simpler than that.
  
• Edit Ubuntu's grub menu config (/boot/grub/menu.lst) to include Solaris. Simply point it to the Solaris parition (hd0,2 for me). Add these lines at the end of the file.
  

  title Solaris
  root (hd0,2)
  chainloader

Done!

I had to install the gani NIC driver in Solaris to get the Ethernet card working and the Open Sound System sound card driver to get sound working.
The Atheros WiFi card is supposed to be supported but I couldn't get it to work, even after adding the pci device alias to the driver. I'll post an update if I get it to work.

bash globbing and dot-files

Found a nifty little feature in bash.

Globbing is expanding file pattterns, like when you typ "ls -l file*" in bash it is not ls that does the file matching and filtering. bash will glob ("expand") the file list file* and ls will get all the files as arguments.
Now, per default bash doesn't glob dot-files. If I do "ls *" I will not get .bashrc and .bash_profile etc. Luckily it is easy to change this behavior. Set the bash option dotglob to enabled and it works!
Example:

[hlinden@spinner testdir]$ ls -Al
total 0
-rw-rw-r--  1 hlinden hlinden 0 Feb  1  2007 .dotfile1
-rw-rw-r--  1 hlinden hlinden 0 Feb  1  2007 .dotfile2
-rw-rw-r--  1 hlinden hlinden 0 Feb  1  2007 file1
-rw-rw-r--  1 hlinden hlinden 0 Feb  1  2007 file2
-rw-rw-r--  1 hlinden hlinden 0 Feb  1  2007 file3
[hlinden@spinner testdir]$ echo *
file1 file2 file3
[hlinden@spinner testdir]$ shopt -s dotglob
[hlinden@spinner testdir]$ echo *
.dotfile1 .dotfile2 file1 file2 file3
[hlinden@spinner testdir]$

Just put shopt -s dotglob in your .bashrc file or in a global /etc/profile.d file.
Another quite nice globbing feature is to have case insensitive globbing.
Check this out:

[hlinden@spinner testdir]$ shopt -s nocaseglob
[hlinden@spinner testdir]$ ls -l F*1
-rw-rw-r--  1 hlinden hlinden 0 Feb  1  2007 file1
[hlinden@spinner testdir]$

Cleaning up sqlplus cut and pastes in vim

Classical problem, you write a short piece of SQL in sqlplus, you then want to cut and paste it to vim edit it. But then you get the really annoying line numbers in front of each line.
Sure you can use save myquery in sqlplus and open the file myquery.sql in vim, but perhaps you want to run vim on another machine, perhaps you run gvim.
So ok, time to get rid of the line numbers.

Here's what we got in sqlplus:

SQL> list
  1  select
  2  e.ename,
  3  d.dname
  4  from
  5  dept d,
  6  emp e
  7  where
  8  d.deptno=e.deptno
  9* order by e.ename
SQL>

Lets cut n paste those numbered lines to a vim session.
We now need to delete the first 4 characters of each line. Easy.
Switch to visual mode, jump to the end of the file, step two rows right, hit delete char.
Or in vim command terms (in normal mode (esc-esc)).

ctrl-v G l l x

Breakdown:
ctrl-v to get in to visual mode
G to jump to the end of the file
l to move the cursor right
x to delete the selected area

Visual mode is quite powerful, you can use almost the same commands to comment out code.
Place the cursor in the first line you want to comment out, hit ctrl-v to do a visual mark, use j to move the cursor down to the last line you want to comment out, hit I to get insert, type two hyphens and hit escape. Done.
In vim command terms:

ctrl-v j j j I -- esc