8.1.7 works on Solaris 8 - How I did it

First off thanks goes to those who posted various tidbits that helped to point me in the right direction. The /etc/system settings are courtesy Brian McKerr.

For those of you struggling to get Oracle 8i 8.1.7 release 3 to run under Solaris 8 ( SunOS 5.8 ) read on...

I assume you probably ran a typical enterprise install and then chose to install the 'starter' database via the db assistant. When that failed you probably read the install doc's and setup your environment variables, tweaked /etc/system a bit, and tried it again. When that failed you came here.

I'm not going to get super technical on you here, but you have to understand the concepts to have a prayer of getting this working and keeping it working once it begins to grow. If you went with the 'no brainer' install (i.e. accept most of the defaults, install the full package, use the starter db's) then the oracle supplied values for /etc/system will almost definitely prove to be insufficient to get the starter db mounted. If you went with a custom option, made a small custom db, and stuck with the oracle recommended values, it probably worked for you. Why don't the same values work for either configuration? A technical answer is somewhat involved, suffice it to say that when Solaris starts the kernel reads /etc/system and constructs the appropriate structures to service special types of memory allocations. The memory will ultimately by allocated dynamically, but the structures have to be established semi-statically as the system comes up. That's a radical over simplification, but it may get the point across. The basic point being you have to preallocate  memory to Oracle. How much memory you have to pre-allocate will vary depending upon what you are doing and will vary over time as your environment changes.

So now the fix and again thanks to Brian McKerr for this example /etc/system set of parameters. You will find that this config is sufficient to handle the starter db's included with 8.1.7 presuming this is your only active instance and that you don't have other applications utilizing these system resources.

set shmsys:shminfo_shmmax=4294967295
set shmsys:shminfo_shmmin=1
set shmsys:shminfo_shmmni=100
set shmsys:shminfo_shmseg=10
set semsys:seminfo_semmni=100
set semsys:seminfo_semmsl=210
set semsys:seminfo_semmns=430
set semsys:seminfo_semopm=100
set semsys:seminfo_semvmx=32767

After plugging these values into /etc/system, making sure your oracle environment is correctly configured per the install docs (yeah, they got that much right), you should be able to successfully install 8.1.7. on Solaris 8. Note, changes to /etc/system do not take effect until you reboot.

I'm running the November release of Solaris 8 ( or October depending on whether you believe the CD or the box the CD came in). I don't have any other system patches applied. Those running earlier releases of the OS should apply the recommended bundle and any specific patches relevant to their environment.

Hope that helps. I found the experience challenging until I thought down and really thought about it so I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents.

Michael Olcott
molcott642_at_earthlink.net

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http://www.deja.com/ Received on Fri Dec 15 2000 - 15:06:06 CST