Category: Kev’s Blog

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Adding a Silicon Power 512GB SSD to my Mac Pro 2008

TLDR; here’s the main points:

  • Restore a Time Machine backup using Recovery, not from Disk Utils from the MacOS installer
  • If an uninitialized SSD is not visible to Disk Utils, it may show up under ‘diskutils list’
  • If still not visible, put it in a USB drive enclosure where it should get detected, then initialize it

I picked up a cheap $50 512GB SSD to add to my Mac Pro 2008. I already have Windows 10 on one SSD, but decided it was time to replace the WD Blue 5000rpm drive also with an SSD. Backed up El Capitan to Time Machine, and now ready to add the new drive.

I mounted it in a Sabrent 2.5 to 3.5 caddy, and then attached to one of my drive sleds.

I’ve had good luck with new and even refurb drives over the past couple of years, this Silicon Power SSD is the first drive that’s given me issues, as it’s not visible in Disk Utils or even to ‘diskutils list’ which normally detects and lists an installed drive even though it’s not usable. Not knowing if it was the SATA connectors, I removed all my other disks, and moved it between each of the 4 slots, and no go, it was still not detected in MacOS Recovery Disk Utils, either when booted into El Cap, or in Windows 10.

First attempt to see what was going on, I tried downloading Silicon Power’s SP Toolbox software, and Windows Defender says it has a trojan:

Ok, well that’s not good. Uninstalled.

To double check that the drive could be detected on other machines I uninstalled it and moved it to a USB3 external drive enclosure. Windows 10 Disk Management now sees the disk as uninitialized, and pops up a dialog to initialize it as either MBR or GPT. Ok, picked GPT but haven’t formatted it yet. Going to now book back into MacOS Recovery to see if I can format it, and restore my TimeMachine backup. Back in a few mins.

Ok. So I have a Recovery partition that for some reason does not boot. The other option is to boot from an MacOS El Cap bootable USB flash drive and restore from Disk Utils there. I tried this and when I selected the ‘Restore…’ menu option, selected the Time Machine USB drive and the SSD as the target, I ended up restoring a copy of the content of the Time Machine backup onto the SSD, but it’s not bootable. First clue that this happened should have been from the boot menu screen when I had 2 identical orange Time Machine drive icons, and not a new silver bootable disk.

Since I don’t have a working Recovery partition to boot from where the ‘Restore from Time Machine’ option is, I went the long way round and installed El Cap from USB to the new SSD which got it bootable and with a new Recovery partition, then booted to this Recovery partition, selected the ‘Restore from Time Machine’ option, left it restoring over night, and now I have I my previously El Cap install completely transferred to the new SSD, successfully bootable and all. That took way longer than I expected, but now successfully up and running!

El Cap boot time from SSD on this 2008 Mac Pro is about 4 seconds, whereas before from a 5000rpm WD Blue it was at least a minute to get to the desktop… a HUGE improvement!

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Running Oracle 19c in a Docker container: part 2: server up and running

Following on from my first attempt to get Oracle 19c running in a Docker container and running out of disk space in my VM, I increased the disk space to 40GB and restarted the steps to build the image. It took about 1.5hrs to complete building and doing the install into the image. Although building an image is a one time activity, unless you’re making changes to the image that’s still a long time, and not something you can do on a regular basis or on demand.

Next, starting up an container from the image, using the provided docker command from the docs:

docker run --name <container name> \
-p <host port>:1521 -p <host port>:5500 \
-e ORACLE_SID=<your SID> \
-e ORACLE_PDB=<your PDB name> \
-e ORACLE_PWD=<your database passwords> \
-e ORACLE_CHARACTERSET=<your character set> \
-v [<host mount point>:]/opt/oracle/oradata \
oracle/database:19.3.0-se2

It then takes around 30mins before the server is actually up and running. At least it gives you some percentage status outputs as it’s starting up, but again, not really practical for starting a server up ondemand or on a whim. For reference, this is on my HP DL380 G7 server with dual 2.4GHz Xeons, running in an Ubuntu 18.04 VM with 4 vCpus and 8GB RAM.

Up and running:

LSNRCTL for Linux: Version 19.0.0.0.0 - Production on 24-MAY-2019 04:55:03
 Copyright (c) 1991, 2019, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
 Starting /opt/oracle/product/19c/dbhome_1/bin/tnslsnr: please wait…
 TNSLSNR for Linux: Version 19.0.0.0.0 - Production
 System parameter file is /opt/oracle/product/19c/dbhome_1/network/admin/listener.ora
 Log messages written to /opt/oracle/diag/tnslsnr/8363ae964727/listener/alert/log.xml
 Listening on: (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=ipc)(KEY=EXTPROC1)))
 Listening on: (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)(HOST=0.0.0.0)(PORT=1521)))
 Connecting to (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=IPC)(KEY=EXTPROC1)))
 STATUS of the LISTENER
 Alias                     LISTENER
 Version                   TNSLSNR for Linux: Version 19.0.0.0.0 - Production
 Start Date                24-MAY-2019 04:55:04
 Uptime                    0 days 0 hr. 0 min. 1 sec
 Trace Level               off
 Security                  ON: Local OS Authentication
 SNMP                      OFF
 Listener Parameter File   /opt/oracle/product/19c/dbhome_1/network/admin/listener.ora
 Listener Log File         /opt/oracle/diag/tnslsnr/8363ae964727/listener/alert/log.xml
 Listening Endpoints Summary…
   (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=ipc)(KEY=EXTPROC1)))
   (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)(HOST=0.0.0.0)(PORT=1521)))
 The listener supports no services
 The command completed successfully
 
 Prepare for db operation
 8% complete
 Copying database files
 31% complete
 Creating and starting Oracle instance
 32% complete
 36% complete
 40% complete
 43% complete
 46% complete
 Completing Database Creation
 51% complete
 54% complete
 Creating Pluggable Databases
 58% complete
 77% complete
 Executing Post Configuration Actions
 100% complete
 Database creation complete. For details check the logfiles at:
  /opt/oracle/cfgtoollogs/dbca/ORADB1.
 Database Information:
 Global Database Name:ORADB1
 System Identifier(SID):ORADB1
 Look at the log file "/opt/oracle/cfgtoollogs/dbca/ORADB1/ORADB1.log" for further details.
 SQL*Plus: Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production on Fri May 24 05:17:49 2019
 Version 19.3.0.0.0
 Copyright (c) 1982, 2019, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
 Connected to:
 Oracle Database 19c Standard Edition 2 Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production
 Version 19.3.0.0.0

Created a connection in SQLDeveloper and can connect!

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Running Oracle 19c in a Docker container: part 1: out of disk space on my VM

This should be filed under “Can you? Yes. Should you? Probably not”

I tried creating a Docker container running Oracle 19c from Oracle official dockerfiles, and straight out of the gate ran out of diskspace:


 
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 
checkSpace.sh: ERROR - There is not enough space available in the docker container. 
checkSpace.sh: The container needs at least 18 GB, but only 14 GB are available. 
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 
Removing intermediate container b53a5e13a45c 
The command '/bin/sh -c chmod ug+x $INSTALL_DIR/*.sh &&     sync &&     $INSTALL_DIR/$CHECK_SPACE_FILE &&     $INSTALL_DIR/$SETUP_LINUX_FILE &&     rm -rf $INSTALL_DIR' returned a non-zero code: 1 


ERROR: Oracle Database Docker Image was NOT successfully created. 
ERROR: Check the output and correct any reported problems with the docker build operation. 

$ df -h 
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on 
udev            3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev 
tmpfs           798M  1.3M  797M   1% /run 
/dev/sda2        30G   12G   17G  41% /

The container needs at least 18GB? Of course it does.

Time to expand my VM disk space (using notes from when I previously had to do this here), and try again.

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Pause when sudo’ing commands on Ubuntu 18.04

I just installed an Ubuntu 18.04 server and noticed when using sudo for commands, it would pause for about 10 secs then execute the command.

A quick google found this post, mentioning that if you change the hostname during install, you should manually add the same hostname to the /etc/hosts for 127.0.0.1.

I did this and now sudo commands execute instantly as expected.

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