I dream of doughnuts, a lightly glazed pair
Steam wafts -- a vapor through the winter air
I see dough rising, throughout all the day
Happy I am the doughnuts are on their way.

She waxes theological at several points, refreshingly asserting, to the gorgeous strings of "Laughing With," that God has a sense of humor. Several lines later she wryly dismisses portrayals of the divine as Santa Claus.

"A fearful symmetry" it has, says Blake
And, my friend, make no mistake
Though it purr, and stretch, and yawn
It is YOU the tiger dreams of dining on.

]]> 2009-06-27T19:26:04Z 2009-06-27T15:26:04-05:00 tag:blog.echickens.com,2009://2.74 2009-06-27T19:26:04Z

In a normal situation, corruption in sys tables generally will require an export/import (or a expdp/impdp) to fix. However, when we attempted to run expdp or exp on certain tables, it would try to pull information from hist_head$, and fail.

ORA-31693: Table data object "BB_BB60"."COURSE_USERS" failed to load/unload and is being skipped due to error:

ORA-02354: error in exporting/importing data

ORA-02373: Error parsing insert statement for table "BB_BB60"."COURSE_USERS".

ORA-00604: error occurred at recursive SQL level 3

ORA-01578: ORACLE data block corrupted (file # 1, block # 28237)

ORA-01110: data file 1: '/home/oracle/dbf/ORACLE/system_file1.dbf'

Fortunately, there is a solution. The hist_head$ table is a repository for column statistics, and therefore something that seems like it can be truncated. But because it is a critical system table, Oracle will not allow you to do it. In order to get around Oracle's defences, you need to put the database in upgrade mode before truncating. This relaxes Oracle's ordinary protections over the SYS objects.

shutdown immediate;

startup upgrade;

truncate table sys.hist_head$;

shutdown immediate;

startup;

We were then able to export the database users, recreate the database, and import.

"Well, I would make sure it's safe to enter the area, check for electrical hazards, then hose it off or call for help."

"Good. So what if you see a bin in an alleyway that looks like it might catch fire?"

"I'd set it on fire, reducing the problem to one I have already solved ..."

Shamelessly stolen from user "wisty" on slashdot

RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03007: retryable error occurred during execution of command: backup
RMAN-07004: unhandled exception during command execution on channel c1
RMAN-10035: exception raised in RPC: ORA-19504: failed to create file "/rman/WEBT6/full_WEBT6_DB_04k7okkf_4_1"
ORA-27044: unable to write the header block of file
Linux Error: 22: Invalid argument
Additional information: 2
RMAN-10031: ORA-19624 occurred during call to DBMS_BACKUP_RESTORE.BACKUPPIECECREATE

The iterative steps to take to ensure that this worked

1. Make sure that the oracle user can write to the baseline directory (in this case, /rman/WEBT6). Use cut and paste to ensure that you are using it exactly.

cp /etc/hosts /rman/WEBT6/full_WEBT6_DB_04k7okkf_4_1

2. Permissions, in my case, were fine. The exact trouble was that Oracle was trying to set up a large backup file, too large to be supported by the elderly 8i release. The solution was to add the "filesperset" flag to my backup command, going from (somewhat redacted)

run {
allocate channel c1 type disk ;
BACKUP format='/rman/WEBT6/full_%t_%d_%s_%p' DATABASE ;
release channel c1;
}

run {
allocate channel c1 type disk ;
BACKUP format='/rman/WEBT6/full_%t_%d_%s_%p' filesperset 1 DATABASE ;
release channel c1;
}

--Robert Louis Stevenson

The Name: The first Christians were a threat to the establishment of Israel. The Sanhedrin met to decide the fate of the leaders of the new religion. Some wanted to kill them. But the wise man Gamaliel stood up and said "refrain from these men, for if this work be of men, it will come to naught, but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it, lest haply ye be found even to fight against God." Acts 5: 38, 39. We work in the hope and the confidence that this work is of God. Paul understood himself to be a disciple of Gamaliel. (Acts 22:3)

Here's Acts 22:3, where Paul says:

I am verily a man which am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Ci-li'ci-a, yet brought up in this city at the feet of Ga-ma'li-el, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers, and was zealous toward God, as ye all are this day.

So far so good, right? But what makes this perhaps an inauspicious name is Paul's actions after being brought up "at the feet of Gamaliel." Paul goes on to say, in Acts 22:4-5,

4 And I persecuted this way unto the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women.

5 As also the high priest doth bear me witness, and all the estate of the elders: from whom also I received letters unto the brethren, and went to Damascus, to bring them which were there bound unto Jerusalem, for to be punished.

H/t: my Mom, who has a keen eye for the finer details.

Hong Kong may have banned imports from the UK due to an outbreak in Oxfordshire, but that didn't help them much. A few days later, imports from China were suspended as yet again H5N1 was found at a Hong Kong market. Five out of twenty excrement samples tested positive, states that last article, but what that means is a little unclear; is it one chicken per excrement sample? One vendor per sample? What is the rate of false positives/negatives? Do chickens test positive only when the virus is active, or will a chicken which "won out" continue to test positive for however many months afterwards? As usual, most news articles don't go into the depths that the obsessive would appreciate.

Flu Sign

The above is a picture of a warning sign taken earlier this year, at the Hong Kong Botanical and Zoological Garden. They're pretty paranoid over there about bird flu and other scary emerging illnesses. It isn't without reason; through trade contacts, Hong Kong has intimate ties with the rest of Asia, where poor people with bad health systems are in close contact with all sorts of different animals (and their diseases).

[...] yes I am a Syrian you little small town maggot, I come from the land where history started, not from some hick country town such as your self... we do not grow corn where I come from, we do not marry our cousins, nor [$%^&] our sisters, so please go back to watching nascar, and saving to pay for the family farm...

1. Syria actually does grow corn, as people following the Israeli raid on the Syrian nuc-- er, "research institution" can attest:

DEIR EZ ZOR, Syria: Foreign journalists perused the rows of corn and the groves of date palms pregnant with low-hanging fruit here this week, while agents of Syria's ever present security services stood in the background, watching closely, almost nervously.

"You see — around us are farmers, corn, produce, nothing else," said Ahmed Mehdi, the Deir ez Zor director of the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands, a government agricultural research center, as he led two of the journalists around the facilities.

2. More to the point, the percentage of marriages between first cousins in Syria is a whopping 30%. This is low by middle eastern standards -- it's around 40% in Iraq, and 55% in Qatar. This advocacy group claims an overall US cousin marriage rate of .1%, which may include second cousins.