Clive Eisen at Hildebrand has just advised me of a bug in the RedHat / Centos Perl binary. Apparently, there is a risk that people using Informix with Perl on RedHat or Centos could have a performance problem.

IBM was named the ARC Overall Winner and Company of the Year in the Data & Information Management software category and received mention for the Volume Mainstream Business Servers category. The company was also awarded first place in the Support subcategory and in the Partnership subcategory.

More here.

Given that IBM sells IDS almost exclusively through the channel means that this must be an implicit endorsement of IBM's efforts with IDS.

My esteemed colleague, Matt Perrins, has just finished a new Redbook on building Ajax applications in a WAS environment. I commend it to your attention, if that kind of thing floats your boat! :)

IDS 11.50.xC2 - Minor Upgrade Problems

I just upgraded my test IDS MACH cluster from IDS 11.50.FC1 to 11.50.FC2 and encountered two minor problems:

1. The SDS server didn't come up after the upgrade. It stuck in fast recovery and the Primary Server was blocked in a checkpoint. I was able to shutdown the SDS server via 'onmode -ky' but needed to kill the Primary server. After starting the Primary Server again, I dropped the SDS server via 'onmode -d delete SDS ', re-added it thru 'onmode -d add SDS ' and re-started the SDS node. Same situation again, it stuck in 'fast recovery'. After another restart, I dropped the 'sysha' database, re-added my SDS node and everything runs fine know. However I didn't find anything in the IDS 11.50.xC2 Releasenotes that this needs to be done when upgrading from 11.50.xC1 to 11.50.xC2.

To finish the KVM series (part 1 and part 2), this last part will show what has to be done to have another virtual machine up&running. This assumes you're using some of the newer Linux distros with udev enabled. The example is for Debian, I guess it's very similar on others.

Let's assume you have your first VM all setup, with IDS running and everything configured the way you wanted. Then you want to setup another one, almost identical (to play with HDR for example), with only minimum necessary config changes, both on OS and in IDS.

Can't be easier: just shut down your VM to save a stable state and copy the image.

Have you ever felt the urge to blog, share your thoughts, wisdom and wit with the world? Adam Gartenberg of IBM is holding a Blogging 101 webcast on Wednesday, 26 August at noon, EST. More details here.

Adam is a really cool guy, and he's passionate about social marketing. Learn how it all works and join the Informix blogging bandwagon!

Extending the Open Admin Tool (OAT)

If you like programming in PHP, you might be interested in developing new functionality for the OAT (Open Admin Tool). A new Plug-In Manager makes it now easier to develop and integrate your own OAT PHP modules. An interesting article from Erika Von Bargen, which describes this new functionality, has been recently published on IBM developerWorks:

Bell Micro have released a new Informix success story. Download it here. (Adobe Acrobat reader required.)

My last KVM blog entry showed how to install all the prereqs and do the initial install of the virtual machine to host your IDS toy instances.

To really start playing we'll need networking of course.
I'm not going into the details explaining every single line of config, much better explanations are already written on the web. But I'll try to give a reasonable overview.

To connect the VMs both to the outer world and between themselves we'll need a kind of virtual switch running on host machine and "wire" network interfaces in VMs to it.
We'll use virtual TUN/TAP network interface and promote it to the virtual switch using VDE utility.

At IBM Database Magazine: Just how difficult is it to retro-fit an auditable security framework?

New Content at the IDS Wiki

New content has arrived at the IDS Developer Edition Wiki:

• onstat Commands (Message Log) - Thank you Spokey for writing this article !
• HDR - High Availability Data Replication

Some Informix Channels and videos on youtube:

The Journal of Informix

Informix World

Jean-George Perrin's Channel

The Impire story

IBM has a couple of tools that are aimed at showing return on investment on various aspects of the technology:

IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) Low Administration ROI Tool

and

Informix Dynamic Server Continuous Availability Feature ROI Calculator

Making your online.log more readable with IDS 11.5

IDS 11.5 comes with a helpful new onconfig parameter which I didn't realize during the closed beta. It is also not mentioned in the New Features section in the releasenotes.

The name of the onconfig paramter is MSG_DATE and the allowed values are 0 (disabled, DEFAULT) and 1 (enabled). It could be dynamically set thru onmode -w[f|m]. If MSG_DATE is enabled, every message written to the online.log will be prefixed with the current date. Take a look at the following examples:

There is a very useful script from Jonathan Leffler available here.

I mentioned this RedBook in one of my earlier posts and wanted to have a closer look at it.

I remember that when I looked at the contents originally, I was surprised to see no mention of physical and only a limited discussion of file system security. The only discussion relating to file system security was around backups.

In my opinion, another omission was that there is no suggestion made of what sort of things you should audit with the onaudit program.

Some of the options are presented to the reader without any real emphasis as to which is a better option. For example, there is no mention that regular DES encryption (as opposed to Triple-DES or DES3) is not a very good option. Although it is mentioned that Electronic Cook Book (ECB) cipher mode is easy to crack, it's also not very well highlighted and didn't jump out at me. (It will leap out at you if you scan the PDF for the string "ecb", but if you were reading the article normally, it certainly wouldn't, as it's in a section called "Sample Settings". :-) )

I was looking at this article that I found via Informixcity (although it's probably been on here as well!)

"Informix seeks developers", it says, and then promptly goes on to say bugger-all about Informix seeking developers!

Well, I can attest that it's true that IBM, with Informix, is on a quest to find developers. I spend a large portion of my working life talking to people who have existing applications on other databases, who are considering migrating away from Oracle because Oracle now competes with them, or who want to move up from "personal databases" into the big leagues, or who want to use some killer aspect of our technology.

Because we're not able to make Drupal behave in quite the way we wanted, Eric has created an "Ask Spokey" forum which will allow people to review questions and their answers more easily in future. The scrolling list of blog entries makes it difficult to find anything after a while.

The forum is here.

IBM License Metric Tool is a no-charge offering that helps calculate number of Processor Value Units (PVUs) including supported virtualized servers that are available to installed Passport Advantage PVU-based software.

This is not just another product, it is free technology that aids in the compliance and remediation space that we all struggle with. (Well, not me personally, obviously! :-) )

Since people will inevitably ask for help with this no charge option, there is some free education available on the 12th of August. This will equip you to commission this technology for yourself.

GENERAL

IBM has released a RedPaper, which is an overview of IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Databases: Informix