Raw Devices and RHEL4

If you're using raw devices with RHEL4 you might not know that their permissions are not retained after reboot.

Solution for this is to simply edit the file:
/etc/udev/permissions.d/50-udev.permissions

If your raw disks are used for RAC voting disks or OCR for example
you could change a line containing "raw/*:root:disk:0660" to something like: "raw/*:oracle:dba:0660" and that should do the trick.

A small invaluable utility

If you're like me and prefer command line tools for some operations then you need to familiarize yourself with a tool called rlwrap. This handy little tool will give you a command line history for various command line tools. I use it with sqlplus, rman etc..
Here is how I call it from .bash_profile:

alias dba='rlwrap sqlplus / as sysdba'
alias rman='rlwrap rman'
alias sqlplus='rlwrap sqlplus'

After setting these aliases I have a command line history for sqlplus and rman. Rlwrap can even be configured to include word completion lists to enable fast typing of command sequences. You should find .rpm for rlwrap easily with google.

Posting starts..Hello World!

Having had this in my mind for a while I finally decided to start blogging. This blog will have mainly technical topics and most of it will be around various Oracle technologies.
I think this could be a great way to share ideas with my friends and collegues. Also having a blog could act as a sort of a "personal technical diary", I think it might be nice to see afterwards what topics were "hot" at a given point in the past. Any comments will be appreciated.