Re: Upgrade Issues for Solaris 2.6 --> 7 or 8?

I was able to go from Solaris 2.7 to 2.8 without reinstalling Oracle, so there appears to be good compatability between those OS versions. This was on an Ultra-10 box.

To go up from Solaris 2.6 I *believe* you are going to have to perform a full Oracle installation after you have Solaris + OS patches installed and running. If not, you may get errors about libraries not found when trying to run some Oracle binaries. You can always try it and see. I was going the opposite direction, so things may be different for you.

I'd suggest leaving your existing Oracle installation in place, and creating a new ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_BASE for the new install. You'll need to delete or edit the file /var/opt/oracle/oraInst.loc (if it exists), so the installer doesn't see the old installation.

There's no need to play with the DB files if you are installing the same Oracle version (base and patches).

Once you are really happy with the new install you can just remove (rm -r) the old ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_BASE.

A few files in /etc that you might want to save off for reference *before* the OS install (some of these are symlinks, so copy them):

 defaultdomain   hostname.hme0   netconfig       nsswitch.conf  
shadow          vfstab
 defaultrouter   hosts           netmasks        passwd          shells
 group           inetd.conf      nodename        resolv.conf     system

Also, you may want to save stuff in /etc/init.d and /var/opt/oracle.

Note: I went with the "initial" OS install, as opposed to the "upgrade", which forces it to put down a fresh install. I went with 2G for the root and 1G for swap partitions, which seems to be a good starting point.

You may have to crank up a couple settings in /etc/system, in particular semmsl and semmni. If you don't, you may get strange errors when trying to start the instance, with little trace or diagnostics. For playing around, 256 seems to work ok for each. Evidently the OS consumes some of these resources internally or something. [note: I've got a couple things going on, so this might be partly due to a 9.0 instance I'm also running].

good luck,
-Peter

hboswel1_at_bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> On Wed, 13 Feb 2002 14:15:56 -0500, Peter Sylvester <peters_at_mitre.org>
> wrote:
>
> >I know from experience <g> that you can't move the Oracle 8.1.7 binaries
> >from Solaris 2.7 or 2.8 to 2.6, as the Solaris libraries changed, at
> >least in part to support of 64 bits. I'm not sure if the reverse is
> >true, but its likely. And you can't just relink, evidently there are
> >different object (.o) files and/or makefiles that Oracle installs.
>
> So you're saying I should uninstall Oracle and reinstall after I've done the
> OS conversion?
Received on Wed Feb 13 2002 - 15:09:31 CST