Re: Reinstall OS completely without reinstalling Oracle

> So, here is the problem.
> We were given HP DL585G7s with RHEL5.3 installed. I installed 11.2.0.3.0 RAC.
>
> We just found that the DL585G7 is only certified with RHEL5.5 or later.
>
> The SA team would rather install the OS from scratch than do an upgrade, and I understand the reasoning behind it.

That's quite strange because the difference between RHEL 5.3 and 5.5 is very minimal. To update from 5.3 to 5.5 one has only two commands to run:

sudo yum update -y
sudo shutdown -r now

The first one will update the OS from 5.3 to the latest of the 5.x branch and probably install the latest kernel. The next one simply reboots the machine with the new kernel.

You should reinstall from scratch when you move from 4.x to 5.x or from 5.x to 6.x, but not within the same branch like you want to do here.

IMHO if your SA prefers to reinstall from scratch to get to 5.5, he has way too much spare time or he doesn't understand how RHEL works. Sorry, no offense here.

> The oracle grid and db homes are in /var/oracle.
>
> Does anyone know if it is possible to reinstall the OS from scratch without touching /var/oracle so we don't have to reinstall Oracle?
> I'm thinking /etc/oratab can be save/restored or recreated, but I think the big problem would be that init scripts and so forth would be removed by the fresh install.

According to another post from you, then /var is a partition in which /var/oracle is a directory. You will thus loose your data if you reinstall from scratch. If you do decide to reinstall, then consider using the Oracle Flexible Architecture (OFA) instead of /var/oracle. See [1] and [2] for more info on the OFA.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_Flexible_Architecture [2] http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/install.111/b32002/app_ofa.htm#i633068

HTH, David

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David Robillard
http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidrobillard
http://itdavid.blogspot.com/
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