Graduation rapidly approaches.
June is like 5-6 weeks away.
I have every intention of graduating. I finished all my paperwork, paid all my fees. I reorganized my ducks into correct rows. Now it’s time to finish my projects.
Project 1:
You know, I was actually up late last night pounding away on this. Debugging is the worst, cuz you can waste like an hour+ on something dumb and then yell and scream at your computer (even though you wrote the code…) and go to bed. Oh well, I made lots of progress, and even killed my first bad guy last night!
Project 2:
At this point, I no longer need this project to graduate, but have become so interested with it, that I can’t help myself.
I am following this guide to setup an Oracle RAC (11g, OEL, iSCSCI SAN, …)
Basically the project is to setup an Oracle Database on multiple computers, to provide high-availability (aka if either computer crashes everything is still up). The computers are called nodes, and they are joined together into a cluster. The cluster relies on a SAN (Storage Area Network – aka shared storage) provided via iSCSI (over the network).
The problem is that I’m doing it on a Mac Mini. There are some inherent issues:
- The nodes all run Linux – Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) to be exact. Version 5.x does not really like the Mac Mini’s USB ports, so you have to boot off the CD and hope it picks the USB port that the keyboard is plugged into. You CANNOT have a KVM plugged into the Mini during install, and you may have to try all 4 USB ports to get it to work.
- You cannot install OEL directly onto the Mac hardware. After months of testing, I found that the easiest way to succeed was to install the Mac OS, then install OEL on top of the Mac OS, deleting only the Linux partitions, and the MAC partition. This is a very weird process. Apparently the Mac Hardware needs the 200MB Fat partition to boot?
- The Mac Mini only has one (1) Gigabit Ethernet port. Oracle RAC nodes are required to have 2, so I’m using USB network adapters (successfully). Unfortunately I don’t have very many, so the size of my RAC is limited.
People think I’m crazy to spend so much time and effort making these little Mini’s do something useful, but I just love them. I have like 10+ on my desk, and I’m hoping for many more. I’d like to build a little cloud or something with them. Only time will tell.