Oracle on Linux - a recipe

Installing Oracle 7.3.3 on Linux 2.0.29

This text has - as all 'howtoids' - grown from just a couple of notes about how to get around some troubles. Despite the name of the file, it isn't quite a HOWTO; anyway - it does give a crude description of what one should do to install Oracle 7.3.x - the Workgroup Server or the Enterprise Server. It is (pt.) the policy of Oracle Corp. to give test licenses of their server SW quite liberally. As a matter of fact you can even download it from http://www.oracle.com - their home page is well worth looking at.

As I stated above, this is just a crude cook book description. It doesn't tell you how to use Oracle when it's installed - maybe I, or someone else will include this later. Oracle's own documentation is quite huge, to say the least, but it's thorough, and now you get it as a set of HTML pages - there even is a java based search engine in it - very useful feature.

This file also doesn't tell anything about Oracle Terminal, or any other sofisticated utilities - but this may be added later.

A note about memory: Oracle needs a lot of it, though I'm not sure exactly how much. I tried installing it on a SCO 5.04 with 32Mb RAM, but it failed. But then SCO has absurd ideas about how much RAM one should have (If you ever try to boot an SCO machine, you'll see that Microsoft owns a patent in it - maybe that's part of the explanation). I guess that 64Mb will be satisfying - I have it in 80Mb now, and free tells me it's all in use, but I run fvwm95 (an X window manager), httpd and several others.

Most of this description came from Roland van Hout <rvh_at_foxim.uucp> - I just brushed it up a little, tried it out and added a few points.

In short this is what I did (Oracle Enterprise Server 7.3.3):

0. You'll need to set (at least) three environment variables (see below):

ORACLE_HOME  #The 'home directory' of the Oracle database
ORACLE_SID  #The 'System ID' of your database - any four letter word
ORACLE_TERM  #The terminal specification to use - vt100 always works

1. Create group dba and user oracle as a member of dba and with home directory = $ORACLE_HOME. Look in 'man group' to see how to create a user group in Linux - essentially it means adding a line to /etc/group like this:

dba::101:oracle

'dba is the group name, '101' the group number and 'oracle' is a member of the group 'dba'.

2. Log out and log in as oracle - this way you can 'connect internal' in svrmgrl without getting asked for a password. Plus you don't have to change owner/group on the files you create.

3. Copy the entire CD to $ORACLE_HOME. When you've done that, you must unpack the packed files - they end with '_'. The program to do this is oiuncomp - it is in the orainst directory. Copy it to eg. /bin and do something like:

find . -name "*_" -print -exec oiuncomp {} \;

This will find all the compressed files, print it's name and execute oiuncomp on it.

4. There are some directories called mesg_ship in this new tree - copy or move the content of these to their parent directory (they're called 'mesg') - if you don't, you won't get meaningful error messages.

5. Create these directories:

$ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/log,
$ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/audit
$ORACLE_HOME/network/log

• if you don't you'll get messages like 'couldn't create audit trail ...' when you start svrmgrl (see below) 6. Edit either /etc/profile or oracle's .profile to set ORACLE_HOME to the directory where you placed the content of the CD. Set ORACLE_TERM=vt100 and ORACLE_SID=<a four letter word like orcl or test> 7. In $ORACLE_HOME/dbs create init<$ORACLE_SID>.ora from init.ora and edit it to fit your needs. Remember to set the following:

compatible = 7.3.3.2.0 # or whatever your version (> 7.2.0.0.0) license_max_sessions = <a number>
license_max_users = <a number>

NB: There's a link between 'processes' and 'license_max_users':

processes >= license_max_users + <number of background processes (at least 5)>

(Look in the sample file dbs/init.ora to see the option 'processes').

8. Now you can start svrmgrl (actually just sqldba) - there is a svrmgrm, which requires Motif to run, but I couldn't get it to run. Anyway I prefer the line interface.

9. CONNECT INTERNAL - the response should be 'connected to an idle instance'

1. STARTUP NOMOUNT - you get some lines of status info
2. CREATE DATABASE - look in the doc's for the details. Specify at least:

create database datafile '<filename>' size <a number>;

Do yourself a favour and make an SQL file, eg createdb.sql and run it from svrmgrl with:

@createdb

This is because svrmgrl (and sqlplus) don't interpret your <backspace> correctly - probably something about the ORACLE_TERM not being right. This has caused me endless troubles :-)

1. Now you can start at running scripts from rdbms/admin:

@rdbms/admin/catalog #runs rdbms/admin/catalog.sql @rdbms/admin/catproc #runs rdbms/admin/catproc.sql

• assuming that you started svrmgrl from $ORACLE_HOME.

13 When this is done, configure the listener - the daemon that accepts connections from SQLnet. What you need is /etc/listener.ora:

TEST=
 (ADDRESS_LIST=
  (ADDRESS=
(PROTOCOL=TCP)
(HOST=linux)
(PORT=1521)

  )
 )

SID_LIST_TEST=
 (SID_LIST=
  (SID_DESC=
(SID_NAME=test)
(ORACLE_HOME=/usr/local/oracle7)

  )
 )

STARTUP_WAIT_TIME_TEST=0
CONNECT_TIMEOUT_TEST=10
TRACE_DIRECTORY_TEST=/usr/local/oracle7/network/log TRACE_FILE_TEST=TEST
LOG_DIRECTORY_TEST=/usr/local/oracle7/network/log LOG_FILE_TEST=TEST The many occurrences of 'TEST' is the name of the listener - you can replace it with what you like. If you omit the last 6 lines, they should get sensible defaults. When you've made this file, execute lsnrctl and issue the command 'start test' (or whatever you've called your listener) - and that should be it! Now you should be able to see the Oracle over the net - from ODBC and via SQLnet. Use SQLnet clients whenever possible - it's far better than ODBC (much faster). Received on Mon Oct 27 1997 - 00:00:00 CST