How to access the Geo-Blocked websites using AWS

Hello Friends, hope you are doing well.

I just wanted to share my findings/observations, on how to access geographically blocked websites using AWS.

Hope this may be helpful, when you are trying to access your personal information back home, while travelling abroad. Also, if you want to watch your favorite programs while travelling, for example Indian application “Voot”, which works only in India.

VPNs are also good option for accessing the content that is blocked in your own country. There are lots of VPNs out there to choose from, for watching streaming media and services from another country.

AWS is another option to access the Geo-blocked websites.

The below listed high level steps can be followed to access Geo-blocked websites using AWS.

·       Login to AWS console

·       Change Region in AWS to specific region, from where you are trying access website.

Example: “Asia Pacific (Mumbai)” to access Indian application “Voot”

·       Open EC2 service page and create an EC2 instance with Windows OS

·       Connect to this EC2 instance using “Remote Desktop Connection” from your laptop/PC

·    Open IE (Internet Explorer) in EC2 instance and then you can browse the website that you couldn’t access from your laptop/PC

Hope this may be helpful, if you are trying to access Geo-blocked websites.

"ORA-15040: diskgroup is incomplete” while Mounting or Dropping disk group

I faced the below error while trying to mount the disk group. Got the same error while trying to drop this disk group.

ORA-15032: not all alterations performed
ORA-15017: diskgroup "DATA" cannot be mounted
ORA-15040: diskgroup is incomplete

Just to give the background, this is two node RAC cluster and the servers had been reimaged to upgrade the OS. I have built Oracle cluster after server re-imaging.

Then I started ASMCA to create the new ASM disk groups and noticed that the disk group “DATA” was already present in “Dismounted” state as shown in below screenshot.

Now I was suspecting that this issue could be due to some residue remaining in some disks after server re-imaging. It could be possible, if somehow few disks have been missed to format after re-imaging the servers.

Executed below query to find the disks which was causing the issue.

SQL> select GROUP_NUMBER, name, disk_number, MOUNT_STATUS, HEADER_STATUS, MODE_STATUS, state, os_mb, total_mb, path from v$asm_disk where HEADER_STATUS not in ('CANDIDATE', 'PROVISIONED', 'FORMER') order by GROUP_NUMBER,name;

The output of above query showed three disks with:

“HEADER_STATUS” as “MEMBER”,

“GROUP_NUMBER” as “0”

It means that there are three disks associated with the disk group “DATA” which is in dismounted status as shown in screenshot.

Formatted these three disks using “dd” command. Re-opened ASMCA and the disk group “DATA” got disappeared. Then created the disk group “DATA”.

Hope this blog will be helpful if you come across this scenario where servers have been re-imaged for cluster build and missed to format some or all disks in the cluster after server re-imaging.