My new employer is Network Integrity Services, a UK-based IBM business partner with a speciality in IBM system P hardware and software

If you need any new system P hardware, you know where to go

I don’t really update this site anymore, now I just use a tumblog at http://ewan.to

The Oracle UK Support phone number is 08704 000 900 - I don’t know why they hide this, but I assume it’s to stop customers phoning up to complain that their open service request has been ignored for 5 days despite being high priority.

On the other hand the various IBM Support phone numbers for the UK are clearly listed on the IBM.com website, covering everything from mainframe faults through to PC support, all on one page.
Does the willingness of a company to advertise their support phone number rather than an email address or web-based form indicate the quality of support you’ll receive? That would be worth a survey.

If you fancy yourself as a comedian submit your joke here to find out if it’s one of the best jokes in the world, it’s a fun little site I wrote and hopefully you might like it

It’s basically hotornot but for jokes, which is why I’ve called it Joke Or Joke!

In AIX 5.3 ML3 IBM made the very unexpected (and very welcome) move to include their geographical logical volume manager software available for free, when previously it would cost you $1000s to purchase as a component of their HAGEO or HACMP/XD high availability software.

This means you can now implement logical volume mirroring between 2 AIX 5.3 servers over any IP based network (no fibre needed!) for zero cost at the volume group level, so below any filesystems or logical volumes you have in place, everything gets copied bit for bit. If you have the bandwidth, there’s no limit on what you can mirror, anywhere from the smallest to the largest filesystems.

Indeed, with some thought and customisation, you could implement your own simplified version of HACMP/XD and save a fortune in software licenses, though you’ll never get the level of customisation and support as you would by purchasing the full product.

For a lot of people though, the expense of HACMP/XD rules out the option of a fully automated disaster recovery system, impressive as it is, and this is where Geo LVM comes in. By installing a few AIX packages, and doing some fairly basic configuration work, you can start to mirror a filesystem from your primary to backup AIX server and if you ever have a disaster, you can follow some fairly straightforward steps to bring up your backup server with a full copy of your filesystem data at the moment the connection was lost to the primary site.

IBM have made a large and very useful PDF on the subject available here which goes into great detail about what the capabilities of Geo LVM and the choices you can make when implementing it.

Below, we will go through the steps of installing and configuring the software in a basic setup.

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To list all the open Oracle cursors you can run the following SQL against the Oracle database:

SELECT s.sid, q.users_executing, q.sql_text
FROM v$session s, v$sql q
WHERE s.sid IN( 24,27,30 ) AND q.address = s.sql_address
ORDER BY s.sid;

The above SQL will list all the open cursors which belong to the sids 24, 27, and 30. To get the full list with no filtering, run:

SELECT s.sid, q.users_executing, q.sql_text, q.hash_value
FROM v$session s, v$sql q
WHERE q.address = s.sql_address
ORDER BY s.sid;

Be aware this query can return 100s or 1000s of results on a busy system.

Sometimes when an IBM ESS vpath disk has previously been assigned to AIX and is now assigned to Windows, or vice versa, you aren’t able to access the disk even when it all looks correct. The first thing to check is whether the vpath still has a persistant reservation on it.

In AIX this is easy, run

lquerypr -vh /dev/vpathXX

to see if a vpath has a persistant reservation, then

lquerypr -ch /dev/vpathXX

to clear the reservation.

If the disk is only assigned to a Windows server, going into the Device manager and uninstalling the disk involved seems to do the trick most of the time.

Ive just found this neat trick on google for getting a date in Unix other than todays without any fiddling, perl scripts, complicated maths, or anything else. Just run

TZ=GMT+24 date ‘+%d/%m/%y’

and you will get yesterdays date

TZ=GMT-24 date ‘+%d/%m/%y’

will get you tomorrows date.

This works in Korn Shell on AIX, C Shell on Solaris, Bash on Linux, and I imagine almost everything else out there.

You can do any multiple of 24 to get you a date, e.g. -144 will give you the date in 7 days time, it handles month changes, year changes, lead years, everything.

GigaOM and the Observer newspaper are both carrying the story that Orange may be partnering with Google to develop a mobile phone in partnership with phone manufacturer HTC.
I find it bizarre that people think all you need to do is contract out your phone design to HTC or another manufacturer, slap in a couple of preinstalled applications, and you’ll take the mobile phone world by storm.

Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and dozen of other companies have spent years working on mobile phone designs, Opera have spent years working on a mobile phone web browser, and yet people act like it’s a simple job to take their market share away.

Given that I’m running a Sony K800i phone with Opera as the web browser, and GMail as the email client (running as a J2EE program), I don’t see what benefits this “Google Phone” would bring that don’t already exist.

In 12 months time, the technology will have leaped forward again, this concept that we even need a Google phone to get a mobile web is just nonsensical.

Dean Hunt, a search engine optimisation (SEO) guy, is running a couple of posts on his blog saying that he’s been contacted by an unnamed company and asked to remove himself from google because he ranks higher than the unnamed company.

This has gotten him plenty of attention from very high profile websites, such as slashdot.org, reddit.com and digg.com, which I’m sure is a happy coincidence for Dean as on his website he carries information on affiliate linking, search engine optimisation, and other things that happen to make him money.

The cynics amongst you though might think that when Dean posted a blog entry on the 4th October saying that he would soon be running a viral ad campain, and then on the 8th October saying that it would be delayed slightly. Perhaps could this takedown email be a fake viral ad campaign for his own blog, or am I just spending too much time on the Internet?