Home ReModeling – Don’t Do It

I have a My Space account as of today. I was checking out a link that Larry in Payroll sent me but I had to register in order to view the site so I ended up with a My Space account. I would post this to my Blog but I have to update my WordPress software and I don’t have that much time tonight.

When the tile de-installer engineers arrived today I had everything moved out of my house except for a few large pieces of furniture. Joanne was thinking that the tile should be chipped up and removed in a day but I knew that wouldn’t be the case.

When I was laying down the Pergo several years ago I ran across some places in the kitchen where I noticed a layer of tile underneath the big exposed pieces of tile. I thought that the original 2”x2” tile was in the kitchen, it turns out it was everywhere except for the sunken living room.

Not only is there tile on top of tile but there is the original vinyl floor at the very bottom. I knew the woman we bought the house from was insane but the previous owners had to be just as insane or in the possession of taste as bad if not worst the owner we met.

One of the flooring engineers proceed to take a heavy hammer (looked like 20 ounces or maybe a 22 ouncer) to a section of 2×2 tile and started beating on it with considerable force. The tile refused to break up and disintegrate and I then knew we were in for it. The store where we purchased the new tile from called Joanne and informed her that it was going to cost more to ripped out another layer of tile. Joanne informed the lady on the other end of the phone that the contract doesn’t state this and they went back and forth. I guess Joanne grew very vocal for her anyway and the lady asked her to stopped yelling. That’s where Joanne told her she be welcome to talk to me if she wanted to hear real yelling.

At the end of this very heated discussion Joanne convinced the lady she would have to eat the cost that we weren’t going to pay another dime. Personally, next time Joanne wants new tile I’ll buy a new house. This has turned into the project from hell. I don’t even remember when we actually started this project but it has involved painting the ceilings which are covered with that wonderful Florida invention popcorn resulting in one of the worst surface areas in the world to paint. While you are painting it you lose your vision and go blind because the popcorn breaks apart and covers your body in a fine dust and coats your lungs with a thin protective layer of poison.

Next it was on the painting the walls whereupon we discovered an incredible amount of water damage at the front of the house underneath the bay window that the previous owner must have put in herself. We had to repair that of course.

The estimate for the number of days it would most likely take to complete the floor work was 5 to 6 days. With the new bonus level added to the mix I’m guessing that will extend the timeline by at least two days. Joanne is staying at a LaQuinta in Coral Springs (great rate, nice musty smell and partial lighting in the rooms but it has free internet). Half the light bulbs are burned out and the room has a distinct smell that doesn’t want to vacate.

I’m working from my patio, the temperature is great tonight and there is a little breeze. Tomorrow night will be a different story. I can’t run the A/C because I don’t want the dust to infect the A/C ducts (I have Stanley Steamer on standby to come out afterwards and clean out all of the duct work) any more than want the restricted air flow blows in there during the removal process.

So tomorrow will be Day Two of the continuing adventure of why to buy a new house if you want new tile saga.

I forgot to share the best part, no one speaks English except for me. I am getting better at improvised sign language which is a great skill to have nowadays when you are using contractors, sub-contractors and laborers. I need to get a portable easel which will assist me with the diagrams of things like pieces of tile, what a house looks like, etc.

More tomorrow. If you prefer to not receive these messages you can unsubscribe at any time.

Production Cluster Part Two

After the re-installation of Clusterware it turns out the original problem – Node (Blade) 5 not joining the cluster was still there.

At this point we determined that we had read through every log file, examined every core dump, trace file and we next started comparing the OS system configuration including kernel parameters, etc. of all the boxes to the blades we used to earlier build the four node QA Cluster.

I read through just about every Metalink note on Clusterware reported problems and resolutions and I recalled one installation where they had a problem with the network adapters. I then started focusing on using traceroute, ping and the UNIX Administrator installed some trace tools and started going through the process of validating the switch configurations, etc.

The problem turned out to be another host on the network was assigned the same IP address that had been assigned to the cluster private interconnect for Node (Blade) 5. At that point we requested and received a new IP address, reconfigured the Network adapter and attempted to start up the Clusterware processes for Node 5. This time the processes came up and stayed up.

This raises a more important issue in how did an adapter that was assigned to be the private interconnect adapter whose traffic should not be leaving the subnet collided with a public adapter on another node. We haven’t completed our investigation into this problem but we will begin investigation of this matter at the beginning of next week April 16th.

Production Cluster Part One

During the week of April 2nd, 2007 started the process of installing Oracle Cluster 10g R2 on six Itanium Blades running HP-UX 11.23.

The first pass at installing the software resulted in five blades forming and joining the Cluster without any problems. We had trouble getting node (blade) 5 to join.

After spending a few hours troubleshooting we decided it would be beneficial to drop (delete) the fifth node from the cluster configuration and use the clusterware software options to add it back in. Accidentally, during the process to drop the fifth node we accidentally deleted the first node which also happened to be the master node at the time.

At that point I decided to de-install the Oracle clusterware software and start over. If you have ever used the Oracle Installer to de-install software you are aware that the majority of the times the Oracle Installer leaves directories behind. In the case of Oracle Clusterware and the fact that after the two root.sh scripts are executed by the root user before you can proceed with uninstalling the Oracle software via Oracle Installer you need to change the owner of CRS_ORACLE_HOME back to oracle:oinstall. The Installer also needs access to /var/opt/oracle, /usr/local/bin and /etc/oratab. Surprisingly, the Installer actually removed the bulk of the installed software, however, we still have to remove some directories under $CRS_ORACLE_HOME or /opt/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/crs/.., had the root user remove /var/opt/oracle all together as well as remove /etc/oratb and the three shell programs in /usr/local/bin – dbhome, coraenv and oraenv. Last but not the least important because you may not be able to successfully re-install the software if you don’t zero out the voting disk and cluster registry raw devices. If you are using OCFS2 then you may not have to clear or erase these two key file resources but if you are using raw devices you MUST do this.