Jason L. Froebe - Tech tips and How Tos for Fellow Techies » intrepid

Ubuntu 8.10, a tethered Windows Mobile 6 cell phone via USB, Firefox and Pidgin Messenger

Jason L Froebe — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:22:17 +0000

To tether a Windows Mobile 6 cell phone (make sure you have a data plan that allows tethering), you will need to install a few things:

sudo aptitude install subversion build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

Once those are installed, we need to download and build the latest usb-rndis-lite code:

svn co http://synce.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/synce/trunk/usb-rndis-lite
cd usb-rndis-lite/
make
## remove the existing usb-rndis drivers with clean.sh
sudo ./clean.sh
sudo make install

Before you plug in the cell phone, you will need to blacklist the rndis_wlan kernel module:

sudo echo "blacklist rndis_wlan" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
sudo rmmod rndis_wlan

Plug in your cell phone. If you type “dmesg”, you will see something like the following:

[ 152.312099] usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[ 152.500604] usb 4-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 154.138352] rndis0: register ‘rndis_host’ at usb-0000:00:1d.3-1, RNDIS device (SynCE patched), 80:00:60:0f:e8:00
[ 164.441074] rndis0: no IPv6 routers present

This is showing that the phone was found. Let’s take a look at the list of interfaces using ifconfig:

….
rndis0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 80:00:60:0f:e8:00
inet addr:169.254.2.2 Bcast:169.254.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::8200:60ff:fe0f:e800/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:8050 Metric:1
RX packets:29 errors:46 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:23
TX packets:51 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:2097 (2.0 KB) TX bytes:9146 (9.1 KB)

On the phone, turn on Internet Connection Sharing and connect via USB. Wait a few seconds (obtaining an ip address can take up to a minute or so) then issue the ifconfig command again:

….
rndis0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 80:00:60:0f:e8:00
inet addr:192.168.0.102 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::8200:60ff:fe0f:e800/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:8050 Metric:1
RX packets:8113 errors:13535 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:6766
TX packets:8643 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:6063101 (6.0 MB) TX bytes:1890604 (1.8 MB)

Yay! We are connected.

In order to use Firefox, Pidgin or any other software that uses Network Manager, you need to stop the Network Manager daemon:

sudo /etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop

You will be able to use your applications again

Installing Oracle 10g / 11g on Ubuntu 8.04.1 (Hardy Heron) Server JEOS in VMware Server 1.0x/2.0x

Jason L Froebe — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:36:26 +0000

I’ve been tasked with becoming an Oracle DBA, so I need to be able to create an VMware Server image containing 32 bit Ubuntu 8.04.1 Server JEOS and Oracle 10g. Much of the work was taken from Augusto Bott‘s Installing Oracle 11g on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and Peter Cooper‘s How to Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 under VMware Fusion.

I was able to consolidate the methods to work rather well together. As soon as Ubuntu 8.10 Server JEOS (Intrepid) is released, I’ll verify the procedure on that operating system as well.

If you’re looking for instructions on how to install Oracle 11 XE on Ubuntu 8.04.1, look at Installing Oracle Database XE on Debian, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu by Todd Trichler.

Create a VMware Image with the following settings

Choose 32bit Ubuntu for the OS type
1024 MBytes RAM
16GBytes disk space
Ubuntu 8.04.1 (or higher) Server JEOS edition http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition/jeos
Upon the os installation, create a non “oracle” id to use to administer the os.

Install the required updates and packages

$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential xinetd linux-headers-`uname -r` openssh-client openssh-server unzip libaio1 gawk ksh rpm libmotif3 alien lsb-rpm libtool libxtst-dev libxtst6 libstdc++5

Add swap

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/extraswap bs=1M count=1536
$ sudo mkswap /extraswap
$ sudo swapon /extraswap
$ sudo echo "/extraswap none swap sw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
# "/sbin/swapon -s" should show the added swap space
$ /sbin/swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/mapper/oracle10g-swap_1 partition 401400 92 -1
/extraswap file 1048568 0 -2

If VMware Server version is 2.0x or higher, install VMware tools:

$ sudo su – root
$ mount /dev/cdrom
$ cp /media/cdrom/*.gz ~
$ tar zxvf VMwareTools*.tar.gz
$ cd vmware-tools-distrib
$ ./vmware-install.pl

If VMware Server version is 1.0x, install VMware tools:

$ sudo su – root
$ mount /dev/cdrom
$ cp /media/cdrom/*.gz ~
$ aptitude install libgtk2.0-dev libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev xorg-dev wget
$ wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf VMware*.gz ; sudo tar xzvf open-vm-tools*.gz ; cd open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/
$ ./configure && make
$ cd modules/linux/
$ for i in *; do mv ${i} ${i}-only; tar -cf ${i}.tar ${i}-only; done
$ cd ../../..
$ mv -f open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/modules/linux/*.tar vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/ ; cd vmware-tools-distrib/
$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl
$ sudo reboot

Append to /etc/sysctl.conf

$ sudo cat >> /etc/sysctl.conf << EOF
fs.file-max = 65535
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65535
net.core.rmem_default = 1048576
net.core.rmem_max = 1048576
net.core.wmem_default = 262144
net.core.wmem_max = 262144
EOF

Append to /etc/security/limits.conf

$ sudo cat >> /etc/security/limits.conf << EOF
oracle soft nproc 2047
oracle hard nproc 16383
oracle soft nofile 1023
oracle hard nofile 65535
EOF

Append to /etc/pam.d/login

$ sudo cat >> /etc/pam.d/login << EOF
session required /lib/security/pam_limits.so
session required pam_limits.so
EOF

Set up user / groups

$ sudo su – root
$ addgroup oinstall ; addgroup dba ; addgroup nobody ; usermod -g nobody nobody ; useradd -g oinstall -G dba -p password -d /home/oracle -s /bin/bash oracle
$ passwd oracle
Password changed.
$ mkdir /home/oracle ; chown -R oracle:dba /home/oracle ; ln -s /usr/bin/awk /bin/awk ; ln -s /usr/bin/rpm /bin/rpm ; ln -s /usr/bin/basename /bin/basename ; mkdir /etc/rc.d
$ for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 S ; do ln -s /etc/rc$i.d /etc/rc.d/rc$i.d ; done
$ mkdir -p /dbms/oracle ; chown -R oracle:dba /dbms/oracle ; sysctl -p
$ reboot

Retrieve Oracle 10g zip file

Copy the Oracle install zip file from disc or somewhere
Unzip it

Retrieve IP of the network card

$ ifconfig |grep "Bcast"

Install / Configure oracle manually verifying any requirements:

$ ssh -C -X oracle@(ipaddress)
…
$ cd /home//database
$ ./runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs

iSQL*Plus URL:

http://(ipaddress):5560/isqlplus

iSQL*Plus DBA URL:

http://(ipaddress):5560/isqlplus/dba

Enterprise Manager 10g Database Control URL:

http://(ipaddress):1158/em

Long time no here

Jason L Froebe — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:09:45 +0000

I was away for vacation then went into hiding while I brushed up on my Oracle skills for work. All I can say is that I have a lot of material to put into the MyDatabases magazine this week. So much to do it is hard to find time to get any of it done lately. Oh well. The next issue should be out this coming weekend.

In the meantime, count with me the days to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid being released:

Can’t wait that long? Try out the BETA. Check out the new features!