True. People that would never dream of going to court without a lawyer
will reject to consider an experienced partner when dealing with LMS.
On 09.02.2016 19:06, Seth Miller wrote:
Michael,
When dealing with police, the IRS or Oracle LMS, do not engage them directly. You need to have an advocate and a firewall. Urge your company to get a partner involved immediately (if they haven't already). Oracle LMS will tell you all kinds of stuff that isn't true or legally binding. Only an experienced partner will know what information should or should not be shared with them and will work with them to, at the very least, reduce the back fees Oracle will charge.
Seth Miller
On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 11:21 AM, Iggy Fernandez <iggy_fernandez@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:iggy_fernandez@xxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
I found this article:
https://jhdba.wordpress.com/2014/08/06/preventing-standby-databases-opening-in-active-dataguard-mode-chopt/
The summary is that you did not make the change intentionally.
Oracle did it without your asking, without your knowledge, and
without warning you that it had made a change that would cause you
to incur additional licensing charges.
Iggy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2016 08:26:29 -0800
Subject: Re: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard
From: napacunningham@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:napacunningham@xxxxxxxxx>
To: John.Hallas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:John.Hallas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx>; andrew.kerber@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:andrew.kerber@xxxxxxxxx>; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Just wanted to reply with a Thank You to all. I appreciate all the
great advice.
I know I shouldn't take it personal, but it really does irritate
me that Oracle seems to take the position of criminalizing their
customer first. I really do try my best to stay within compliance
as it is the responsible and respectable thing to do, but the
respect sure does feel one sided when dealing with licensing. I'm
just hoping that working with Oracle we can resolve this.
Thanks again,
Michael
On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 11:00 PM, John Hallas
<John.Hallas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:John.Hallas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
What an excellent response Matthew. This is really helpful
information for anyone responsible for ensuring that license
compliance is adhered to.
Thanks for taking the time to write it up and post to the list.
John
www.jhdba.wordpress.com <http://www.jhdba.wordpress.com>
*From:*oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>] *On Behalf Of
*Dimensional DBA
*Sent:* 09 February 2016 02:04
*To:* napacunningham@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:napacunningham@xxxxxxxxx>; 'Andrew Kerber'
*Cc:* 'oracle-l@freelists org'
*Subject:* RE: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard
Don’t answer this question to the list, but you need to think
about why is a licenses audit being performed? Normally a
license audit is only performed when it is believed you are in
violation your licenses, such as turning on the OEM push back
of data to Oracle Support for your databases, uploading files
you provided during a recent SR, Talking to Oracle sales folks
about what you are doing in your company including using
products that they know are unlicensed, your company is in
negotiation to reduce licensing cost or there is some other
negotiation going on.
For you, it would have been helpful to ask for the list’s
support the moment your company was given notice that Oracle
was demanding a license audit. We could have helped you in
advance and eliminated the foreboding you are feeling .
For now, you need to take a moment and breathe.
Once a license audit has started things are out of your hands
and normally in the hands of Chief Legal Counsel and the CFO
(sometimes the CIO) of your company.
Having done licenses audits when I worked for Oracle
Consulting, companies I have worked for (second thing I do
normally starting with a company) and now in my own
consultancy, what is being looked for normally relates back to
that question up above. It really depends on the skill of the
Oracle consulting person sent as to what breadth your audit
will take as there is no training course in Oracle Consulting
on how to do a license audit and there is nothing in the
contract that determines how a license audit will be performed
from a technical basis.
Some pointers during the license audit
1.Your technical personnel should not be talking to the
auditor, including not going to lunch with them. Only a
management level person normally part of the Legal or Finance
team if not the Chief Legal Counsel or the CFO themselves, who
will relate to the technical team what is needed from them for
the audit to be performed.
2.Your team should only provide Oracle what is required. You
do not have to fulfill all requests from Oracle as they
normally overreach in their requests. Your upper management
will help with that decision.
3.They should not have to have direct access to your servers
if you provide a person to run the commands. Normally
technical person is accompanied by lower management level
person to ensure the conversation is only run this command and
put output here, instead of the broader questions Oracle
Consulting will want to ask.
You can send me a private email and I can provide you with a
list of things to check for in unconventional places to verify
license compliance.
As to your question of defense, having worked for a variety of
Chief Legal Counsels, some of who were previous prosecutors,
you again need to breathe.
The defense can be impeded by the answer to the first
question, but if your license snafu is a single database
server and a human has made a mistake, the defense is simple
and your Chief Legal Counsel will deal with it.
If this is one of a variety of license violations then the
defense gets more complicated, versus it is single error
committed on a single server or across the whole fleet. Single
error type versus multiple error types.
I have worked with Oracle Sales on a variety of license
issues, but normally I am telling them when an issue occurred
instead of them finding something in a licenses audit. There
are a variety of things that you can do to help your Chief
Legal Counsel which includes gathering up your logging
information listener.logs and alert.logs on your databases
before they roll off and interpreting the data for them.
Some examples of license violations I have encountered.
1.Those new server replacements had twice the cores as the
previous servers and the DBA team and management was oblivious
to that when the upgrades were done. This basically was a 32
core addition that including EE Edition, RAC, Partitioning,
ASO, Management packs etc. It took a couple of weeks to get
back into license compliance.
2.A standby or primary server crashed and another server was
pressed into service to maintain HA and the other server
actually had a higher core count than the previous server.
3.Databases were flipped off of servers to new servers and the
previous servers were never deprecated or used again, but the
Oracle SW was still installed.
4.A set of test servers utilized production licensing for
testing, then when the production servers were built, someone
forgot to turn off the servers with still running databases in
test.
5.A UNIX/Linux admin mistakenly put the deployment line in
Chef/Puppet code and deployed Oracle SW to the fleet left
there until I did a license audit.
6.A UNIX/Linux admin moved multiple physical servers to a VM
Ware servers and spread the databases across the entire
physical server fleet, which took 2 months to shuffle things
around and condense the Oracle part of the fleet onto a
smaller number of physical VM Ware hosts.
*Matthew Parker*
*Chief Technologist*
*Dimensional DBA*
*425-891-7934 (cell)*
*D&B *047931344**
*CAGE *7J5S7**
*Dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:Dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx>*
*View Matthew Parker's profile on LinkedIn*
<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matthew-parker/6/51b/944/>
*From:*oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Michael
Cunningham
*Sent:* Monday, February 08, 2016 5:01 PM
*To:* Andrew Kerber
*Cc:* oracle-l@freelists org
*Subject:* Re: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard
Thanks Andrew.
On Feb 8, 2016 4:42 PM, "Andrew Kerber"
<andrew.kerber@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:andrew.kerber@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Contact house of brick technologies. They have done quite a
bit of work with oracle audit defense.
Sent from my iPad
On Feb 8, 2016, at 5:37 PM, Michael Cunningham
<napacunningham@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:napacunningham@xxxxxxxxx>>
wrote:
Hello all, we have an Oracle audit going on and we are
being told we are going to get charged for using Active
Data Guard.
Has anyone been successful in working with Oracle to have
them realize these were unintentional and not deliberate?
Technically the feature was enabled, but it was by
accident and incorrect configuration of srvctl. As it
happens, we had one standby database configured
with db_startoption=open, and the other standby database
with db_startoption=read only.
The first was as a result of requiring a "failover" to
physical standby and we missed setting the
db_startoption=mount when we rebuilt the standby on the
server that used to be primary.
Each of the problems have been corrected, but Oracle is
working on a bill and I'm looking for some advice from the
group.
--
Michael Cunningham
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