Monday, November 22, 2010

DBAN *ERROR /dev/sda (process crash)

So I was using DBAN 2.2.6 beta to wipe the drives on a Dell PowerEdge 860. After typing "autonuke," DBAN would load, but instead of starting the wipe I would get these errors:

DBAN finished with non-fatal errors.
*ERROR /dev/sdb (process crash)
*ERROR /dev/sda (process crash)
Press and hold power button to shut down


When I loaded DBAN manually (by pressing enter at the boot prompt instead of typing "autonuke"), I would see an "unrecognized device" in the device list.

I finally figured out what it was: the DRAC had set up some kind of virtual drives. I had to go into the DRAC menu (Ctrl-D when it asks you at the boot prompt), page down until I saw the virtual drives, and then I pressed E to disable them. Once I did that, DBAN ran just fine.

Edit:
I just ran into this same problem on a Dell PowerEdge 1950, but it must have had a different DRAC version because the process of disabling of the virtual drives was a little different. I had to press Ctrl-E to get into the DRAC menu when it prompted me, then I had to arrow down to Virtual Media Configuration and change the Virtual media setting from attached to detached.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

UnsatisfiedLinkError exception loading native library: njni11

So... I was working on automating an Oracle 11.1 db installation on a RHEL 5.5 machine. I automated the software install, but when running dbca to create the database, I kept getting this error:

UnsatisfiedLinkError exception loading native library: njni11

I googled it, but all I found were posts on how I needed to make sure I had installed the necessary packages, in particular libaio and libaio-devel. Well, I had all of those installed but I was still getting the error.

It finally hit me: I was automating everything (using Puppet), and hadn't explicitly configured those packages to be installed before Oracle. So they must've somehow gotten installed afterward. The Oracle install still succeeded for some reason, but dbca wouldn't run. Thankfully it was a VM, so I just told puppet to make sure the required packages were installed, reverted to my pre-Oracle-install snapshot, et voila!

Now time to figure out what these listener.ora and tnsnames.ora files are for and how they should properly be configured...