The Temple of the Mighty Bague

Ok, so we all know there’s The Oracle Way and The Wrong Way (at least according to Oracle DBAs who aren’t me). Well, today I had to renew the SSL cert for an iAS installation. This isn’t something that would make me think twice - I’ve been dealing with SSL setups since 1996, or thereabouts, and iAS is just the 1.3 branch of Apache with a couple of directives overridden. So nothing to worry about.

Ah. Except it doesn’t use an SSL key or certificate in any way you’d consider normal. Instead, it uses a wallet. Stored on the server. Managed from a java gui. On a headless machine which doesn’t have a graphics board and lives 400 miles from me (hence headless).

So, I guess the preferred practice is to copy the wallet locally and work with it there, but that’s just plain silly - I have no desire to clutter up my machine with 4 gig of oracle client crap when I have SQLplus on the server. So - two ssh tunnels and a bit of X forwarding later and I have Oracle Wallet Manager running on my macbook.

There’s the expired certificate - I’ll export it to the filesystem to get a backup of it. Ok, not I’ll export the CSR and just use it to request a new cert. Off to the vendor, hand over a couple of hundred quid and BINGO! Nice shiny new certificate.

Right - I’ll remove the old one…done. Import the new one. Invalid. Hmmm. Does a double check. Import as Trusted Cert (just for elimination). Works fine. Hrm - is it self signing? No idea. I’ll just reload the old cert for now while I work it out. Read in the old cert and……what? It’s turned into a new one? Is there some kind of autosigning happening somewhere?

I am Jacks sense of complete bewilderment.

Since I was no bigger than a weevil

they’ve told me I was evil

that if bad was a boot then I’d fit it.

I’ve been a wicked little lady

but I’ve been trying hard lately

ah, f**k it I’m a monster I admit it.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Curse of Milhaven

I’ve just had a server returned by a client. Apparently it keeps overheating and dying. It’s a 1u box and they swear blind they’ve left a ventilation gap and have aircon in the server room. So, I popped the lid and had a look.

 The first thing that struck me was the amount of muck, crap and dust inside the box. The fans were so full of nasty sticky gungey fluff that they refused to turn. That certainly explains the overheating. I suspect that the server may have been stored in a chicken coop rather than a server room.

Given that I had the top off it to give it a good clean, I reckoned it was only sensible to have a good poke around the thing to make sure there wasn’t any glaring damage. Fairly quickly, I spotted a few places where the temperature had got high enough to cos some solder joints to leak flux. Not a good sign.

Then I saw this. A couple of pins on an interface point which had been bent over so extremely that they were shorting out. “Hmm,” thought I, “that’s not a Good Thing.” Question is, how in god’s name did they get in there to bend the pins? The top panel at this point is actually rivetted in…. ah. The rivets have been drilled out on the side of the casing. 

Anyway, at this point I pulled out the vacuum cleaner in order to give it a good hoovering out. Half an hour of intensive disassembly and cleaning and all the fans on the mainboard were functional. The fan at the front of the power supply assembly were not. So, slid the power supply out and squinted in the back of the box. Dear oh dear - it’s not looking good for you, mister server. I have only one option left open to me:

The Anal Probe…..

I really dread to think what google search strings are going to appear in my web stats next month.

Yup, for want of anything better to say, its time for some introspective navel-gazing. And today it’s about music - specifically the weird things that happen to your taste in music as you get older. See, my taste in music has always been a bit odd, with Richard Wagner happily sharing shelf space with Metallica or Turisas or something. So I’d stick a mix on my ipod and happily listen to a playlist of something like the last act of Die Walküre, followed by a bit of DragonForce, then a couple of tracks from Murder Ballads (Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds), and then a bit of brass band music, maybe some Paul Simon - just random stuff. And I enjoy it equally.

I’ve always been a little worried about what would happen to my tastes as I begin to advance in years - a very good friend of mine, a bona-fide survivor of the sixties, developed a scary penchant for Country Music (The Music Of Pain). Strangely, though, my tastes seem to be getting a bit louder and a bit stranger with every passing year.

Sure, I’ve always liked less obvious (i.e. more challenging) music - I prefer Schöenberg to Mozart, for example. I like Nick Cave’s lyricism and discordances more than the easier-listening clash inspired Kaiser Chiefs, as another example. Lately, though, it’s just gone a bit nuts. Because I’ll play stuff by all four of those artists, frequently back to back and enjoy the juxtapose just as much as the individual pieces.

Now here’s the REALLY wierd thing - as most of the stuff I listen to gets punted to last.fm, imagine my horror to discover that I’m not special after all! There’s LOADS of people whose taste in music is just as mental as mine! So what is it? Am I a pretentious art-wank who only likes stuff nobody else does? Do I just have no definable taste in music? Or does everyone just like what they like and to hell with trying to pigeon hole it?

I don’t know - what are you looking at me for? I think the best thing to do is to get on with listening to my music and not think about it any more.

Which leads neatly into:

ACE Lyric #4

All the best freaks are here, please stop staring at me.

Marillion - Freaks.

“Yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yom POM POM!

Yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yom POM POM!

Ahhhh Ahhhhh AHHHH AHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHH AAAHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHH!”

Focus - “Hocus Pocus”