Tuesday, 21 October 2008

Installing Oracle 9i on RHEL 4.0

In the past I installed DB9i several times under Windows. I might have done it earlier under Linux, but I can't remember how I did it. I also installed 10g several times. But recently I had to work with Oracle Streams under 9.2.0.8. It was a very large database that could not be upgraded that easily in a short notice.

Unfortunately we experienced some problems, on Logminer and on performance. So I wanted to have a clean DB install on a VM ware image so that I could play around a little with it to see if I could get it to work properly on a clean database install.

Installing DB 9i turned out not that simple, when done in the train having just the install-disks. But when having your friends Google and Metalink around the task turns out not too hard.

I used two inputs:
Below I'll set out the steps I took to install 9.2.0.8 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 4.0. If you have another taste of linux, try the document of Werner (it contains also info about other Red Hat flavours) or Google a little further.
Packages
First check out if you have the required packages. The following are required:
  • compat-db-4.1.25-9
  • compat-gcc-32-3.2.3-47.3
  • compat-gcc-32-c++-3.2.3-47.3
  • compat-oracle-rhel4-1.0-3
  • compat-libcwait-2.0-1
  • compat-libgcc-296-2.96-132.7.2
  • compat-libstdc++-296-2.96-132.7.2
  • compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-47.3
  • gnome-libs-1.4.1.2.90-44
  • gnome-libs-devel-1.4.1.2.90-44
  • libaio-devel-0.3.102-1
  • libaio-0.3.102-1
  • make-3.80-5
  • openmotif21-2.1.30-11
  • xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel-6.8.1-23.EL
  • xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-6.8.1-23.EL

This can easily be checked by issueing:
rpm -q make                           \
compat-db                      \
compat-gcc-32                  \
compat-gcc-32-c++              \
compat-oracle-rhel4            \
compat-libcwait                \
compat-libgcc-296              \
compat-libstdc++-296           \
compat-libstdc++-33            \
gcc                            \
gcc-c++                        \
gnome-libs                     \
gnome-libs-devel               \
libaio-devel                   \
libaio                         \
make                           \
openmotif21                    \
xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel \
xorg-x11-deprecated-libs


In my case I lacked the libraries:
package compat-oracle-rhel4 is not installed
package compat-libcwait is not installed
package gnome-libs-devel is not installed
package libaio-devel is not installed
package xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel is not installed

For the X11 stuff I had several dependencies that I resolved with:
rpm -Uhv fontconfig-devel-2.2.3-7.i386.rpm \
pkgconfig-0.15.0-3.i386.rpm \
xorg-x11-libs-6.8.2-1.EL.13.37.i386.rpm \
freetype-devel-2.1.9-1.i386.rpm \
zlib-devel-1.2.1.2-1.2.i386.rpm \
xorg-x11-xfs-6.8.2-1.EL.13.37.i386.rpm \
xorg-x11-6.8.2-1.EL.13.37.i386.rpm

rpm -Uhv xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel-6.8.2-1.EL.13.37.i386.rpm \
xorg-x11-devel-6.8.2-1.EL.13.37.i386.rpm


Then Libaio-devel:
rpm -ihv libaio-devel-0.3.105-2.i386.rpm
For compat-oracle-rhel4 you need an Oracle patch: 4198954 from metalink.
This one installs:
  • rpm -ihv compat-oracle-rhel4-1.0-5.i386.rpm
  • rpm -ihv compat-libcwait-2.1-1.i386.rpm
The compat-oracle-rhel4 libary also checks for xorg-x11-deprecated-libs and
xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel.

For the gnome library I also had some depencies, that I resolved by:

rpm -ihv gnome-libs-devel-1.4.1.2.90-44.2.i386.rpm \
ORBit-devel-0.5.17-14.i386.rpm \
esound-devel-0.2.35-2.i386.rpm \
gtk+-devel-1.2.10-33.i386.rpm  \
imlib-devel-1.9.13-23.i386.rpm \
glib-devel-1.2.10-15.i386.rpm \
indent-2.2.9-6.i386.rpm \
alsa-lib-devel-1.0.6-5.RHEL4.i386.rpm \
audiofile-devel-0.2.6-1.el4.1.i386.rpm \
glib-devel-1.2.10-15.i386.rpm \
libjpeg-devel-6b-33.i386.rpm \
libtiff-devel-3.6.1-10.i386.rpm \
libungif-devel-4.1.3-1.el4.2.i386.rpm


What I did was just doing the rpm -ihv gnome-libs-devel-1.4.1.2.90-44.2.i386.rpm (that was the one I had on my dvd) and then added all the dependent rpms that it mentioned. In your case you might not need the alsa and audio libraries.
Change Sysctl.conf
There are a few settings on kernel level to set. Below my sysctl.conf:
# Kernel sysctl configuration file for Red Hat Linux
#
kernel.hostname = rhel4vm.darwin-it.local
kernel.domainname = darwin-it.local

# Controls IP packet forwarding
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 0

# Controls source route verification
net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 1

# Do not accept source routing
net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_source_route = 0

# Controls the System Request debugging functionality of the kernel
kernel.sysrq = 0

# Controls whether core dumps will append the PID to the core filename.
# Useful for debugging multi-threaded applications.
kernel.core_uses_pid = 1
kernel.sem = 256 32000 100 142
kernel.shmmax = 4294967295
kernel.shmmni = 100
kernel.shmall = 2097152
#fs.file-max = 206173
fs.file-max = 327679
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000
kernel.msgmni = 2878
kernel.msgmax = 8192
kernel.msgmnb = 65535
net.core.rmem_default = 262144
net.core.rmem_max = 262144
net.core.wmem_default = 262144
net.core.wmem_max = 262144


Pay attention to the kernel.shmmax, shmmni, shmall (shared memory), fs.file-max (max filehandles), kernel.sem (min, max semaphores), and kernel.hostname + domainname.

Swap space
You need at least the double of your machines memory as a swapspace. To check your memory you can do:
grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo

To check your swapspace:
cat /proc/swaps

You can add an extra drive and format it as swapspace. To add temporary swapspace you can use the following procedure to add for example 1GB swapspace:

su - root
dd if=/dev/zero of=/u01/swapfile01 bs=1k count=1000000
chmod 600 /u01/swapfile01
mkswap /u01/swapfile01
swapon /u01/swapfile01


To remove it again:
su - root
swapoff /u01/swapfile01
rm /u01/swapfile01


Temp space

For the Temp space, if /tmp does not have enough space you can do:
export TEMP=/           # used by Oracle
export TMPDIR=/         # used by Linux programs like the linker "ld"

Create Users
I had a Virtual Machine with RHEL4 already installed and an pre-existing Oracle user. If you haven't then use the following procedure to add the oracle user:
su - root
groupadd dba          # group of users to be granted with SYSDBA system privilege
groupadd oinstall     # group owner of Oracle files
useradd -c "Oracle software owner" -g oinstall -G dba oracle
passwd oracle
Create Oracle Directories


The following directories are needed for the install, with the specified rights. Check if your filesystems have enough space. A complete installation with a starter database will need about 2,5GB. With the addition of some temp space I would be on the save side and reserve at least 5GB.
su - root
mkdir -p /u01/app/oracle/product/9.2.0
chown -R oracle.oinstall /u01

mkdir /var/opt/oracle
chown oracle.dba /var/opt/oracle
chmod 755 /var/opt/oracle


Setting Oracle Environment variables
There are few settings important to install the database. Especially the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL variable that needs to be on 2.4.19.
So I created a little environment script oraenv.sh:
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.19   # for RHEL AS 4
export TMP=/u01/oracle/tmp
export TMPDIR=/u01/oracle/tmp
# Oracle Environment
export ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle
export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/9.2.0
export ORACLE_SID=ORCL
export NLS_LANG=AMERICAN;
export ORA_NLS33=$ORACLE_HOME/ocommon/nls/admin/data
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib:/lib:/usr/lib
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

# Set shell search paths
export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin

The ORACLE_HOME depenent variables are merely for being able to use the database after installing it.
You can run the script by:
. ./oraenv.sh

Do not forget the extra dot '.' in front of it, this will cause the set parameters exported to the calling shell.

Install the database
With this I could install the 9.2.0.4 database with the cd's I got from: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/oracle9i/index.html

Then do not forget to upgrade it to 9.2.0.8. Look for the patch 4547809 in Metalink.
During the run of catpatch, I got time outerrors on the sys.XMLType and sys.XMLTypePI objects. But checking afterwards they turned out to be created and valid.

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