vi-curious Gary J Little's Weblog

Oracle on Network Attached Storage + blue boxin'

so it's not the most thrilling subject, but I found this document on BigAdmin a while ago, and just got around to reading it. The document contains a lot of good tips on setting up Oracle on NAS (Particularly NetApps). The impressive thing I found was that the engineers use real measured data to qualify much of what they recommend. The authors are from Sun's performance group, and from NetApp themselves. Check it out for general Solaris/Oracle/NFS configuration guidelines also.

And by way of apology for such a dry and boring blog entry, please enjoy this gratuitous picture of an original Woz designed blue box I found at the Coumputer History museum. Nice.

( Jul 21 2004, 10:02:21 PM BST ) Permalink

Solaris quiz

OK,
Here's a quick quiz and it's something that stumped me for a while. On the same system (SunOS 5.10, SPARC, Ultra10 - not that it matters) I run the same script under two different shells. When I use vmstat to monitor the system I seem to get totally different results. Under a ksh I get this

 kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
 r b w   swap  free  re  mf pi po fr de sr dd f0 s1 --   in   sy   cs us sy id
 0 0 15 480384 121968 6  22  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  419  292  233  4  3 94
 0 0 29 322856 35840  0   0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  407  573  302 76  1 23
 0 0 29 322856 35840  0   0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  401  564  291 99  1  0
 0 0 29 322856 35840  0   0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  402  582  286 99  1  0
 0 0 29 322856 35840  0   0  0  0  0  0  0  2  0  0  0  417  583  293 98  2  0

but under bourne shell (sh) I get this - hint look at the sys Vs usr column

 kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
 r b w   swap  free  re  mf pi po fr de sr dd f0 s1 --   in   sy   cs us sy id
 0 0 15 480384 121968 6  22  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  419  292  233  4  3 94
 0 0 29 322576 35536 251 2636 0 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0 1072 6707 1052 19 69 12
 3 0 29 322704 35576 187 2007 13 0 0  0  0  1  0  0  0  938 5470  849 17 74  9
 0 0 29 322888 35736 238 2531 0 0  0  0  0  4  0  0  0 1067 6520 1044 17 72 11
 0 0 29 322880 35728 244 2606 0 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0 1072 6673 1038 17 72 11

The vmstat was collected using vmstat 5. The script is very simple

garyli@arches[/home/garyli] $while true
> do
> :
> done

Why is that? What is happening here? The first correct answer will get a Sun Blueprints CD. ( Jul 21 2004, 10:12:47 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [3]

You shouldn't laugh but

Personally I found this story 'Reverse air-rage' on Russian jet hilarious! ( Jul 21 2004, 09:57:24 AM BST ) Permalink