Multiple VMs required I am looking into Postgresql, replication and fail over. One way to set this up is to have a primary, a standby and a witness server. Two run databases, and one - the witness to decide whether a fail over is needed. To test this it would be nice to create three VMs on my desktop to help test ansible scripts. I have downloaded Virtualbox from Oracle, and my desktop has loads of memory.

Introduction I realise I have written a few posts on Ansible, but no overview on how we manage it. I haven’t done any training on Ansible, and this is my first effort at automation (Apart from some bash and python scripts) so there is probably much that could be improved. Our Systems We have about 15 - 25 environments to manage, depending on how you count them. Around 2-5 of these are vanilla in one form or another, so don’t need to be managed by Ansible.

I had a playbook fail because of the error dict object has no element It took me ages to debug it, but the problem is that I had defined the index as a string, but was trying to match it to a number. To fix it, I only had to quote the version in the inventory, and everything worked. I was only caught by this because I was using an old inventory file to test with.

After a lot of trial and error, I finally found a way to make it work. Here is what I did. As noted before, rather than trying to run an installer from a share, I simply copied it on to the local disc of the VM. Before running Ansible on windows, the operating system has to be configured using (for example) the ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1 script. I took the defaults. I didn’t bother setting up any of the advanced options like CredSSP, as in practice there didn’t seem to be any benefit.

The challenge is to run an installer from a share, then run some extra configuration. We do this in Unix (Well, GNU/Linux) all the time, and it is really, really easy. We even have the software on a Windows share, so we just need to mount that and run it! It turns out that Windows is different from Unix. A mounted share doesn’t belong to the system like in Linux, it belongs to a session.

I am not sure how this situation arises, but I discovered that sometimes the windows installer (Puppet based) on Windows gets into a state where it isn’t installed, but thinks it is, which means that the install won’t work, but it generates messages as if it had worked. Under c:\psft\pt\ps_home8.55.23 is only the jre directory. Running the install again appears to work, but doesn’t do anything. The solution is to run the uninstall, then the install will work.

I got an error from powershell: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 PS C:\> Start-Process -NoNewWindow -Verb RunAs Start-Process : Parameter set cannot be resolved using the specified named parameters. At line:1 char:1 + start-process -NoNewWindow -verb runas + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (:) [Start-Process], ParameterB indingException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : AmbiguousParameterSet,Microsoft.PowerShell.Comma nds.StartProcessCommand This is because the Start-Process command has two parameter sets. Looking at the page linked, the parameters are listed in two groups.

A nice feature of RMAN is that if a restore fails, and you rerun it, it realises that it doesn’t have to redo all the work it has already done. At least, that is usually what happens. Today we got: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 RMAN-00571: =========================================================== RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS =============== RMAN-00571: =========================================================== RMAN-03002: failure of Duplicate Db command at 03/29/2018 12:54:29 RMAN-05501: aborting duplication of target database RMAN-03015: error occurred in stored script Memory Script RMAN-06004: ORACLE error from recovery catalog database: RMAN-20003: target database incarnation not found in recovery catalog As documented in oracle support note 2036644.