Month: March 2016

Oracle complains about long identifier on simple operations.

silviuLeave a comment

Soo,

I’m going head first into the oracle db world. I was trying to create an spfile from the pfile and of course it didn’t work:

SQL> create spfile from pfile="/oracle/app/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/dbs/initORCL.ora";
create spfile from pfile="/oracle/app/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/dbs/initORCL.ora"
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00972: identifier is too long

The reason is simple enough, you have to use single quotes instead of double quotes. But it took me a while to find out this so here it is for all other beginners.

SQL> create spfile from pfile='/oracle/app/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/dbs/initORCL.ora';

File created.

SQL>

Errors in mail.log from nagios check_ssmtp

silviuLeave a comment

I got my nagios server banned by fail2ban because of errors in the postfix mail.log log. I know that I can simply whitelist the nagios server but I prefer it working perfectly.

Checking the logs I could see this error repeating itself on each check:

Mar 25 13:01:13 xxx-123 postfix/smtpd[17065]: connect from nagios.example.com[1.2.3.4]
Mar 25 13:01:13 xxx-123 postfix/smtpd[17065]: improper command pipelining after QUIT from nagios.example.com[1.2.3.4]:
Mar 25 13:01:13 xxx-123 postfix/smtpd[17065]: disconnect from nagios.example.com[1.2.3.4]

Apparently postfix is picky about having extra input after a QUIT or DATA command, see details here.

It turns out that I haven’t updated nagios plugins in a while. Even if I kept nagios up-to-date the plugins were at 2.0.3. Updating to 2.1.1 fixed the issue and now I simply see a connect/disconnect in the postfix logs when nagios performs a check.