Re: Installing Oracle 9i on Solaris 9 from CD - Why 'chmod' necessry?

ohaya <ohaya_at_cox.net> wrote in message news:<41A3FFB7.D4928690_at_cox.net>...
> HansF wrote:
> >
> > ohaya wrote:
> >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > We'd been trying to install Oracle 9i on a Solaris 9 machine from CD,
> > > and were finally able to get it working. However, one thing that we
> > > found (that wasn't in the info that we had) was that, as root, we had to
> > > umount the cdrom drive, "chmod 777" the cdrom, then mount it again.
> > > Once we did that we were able to execute runInstaller ok.
> > >
> > > If anyone knows, I'm kind of curious about exactly WHY the "chmod 777"
> > > was necessary?
> > >
> > > Thanks in advance,
> > > Jim
> >
> > I assume cdrom is the mount point. What were the perms & ownership for
> > cdrom before the chmod?
> >
> > /Hans
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I *knew* that someone was going to ask that. I didn't check at the
> time, but I'll try tomorrow. Sorry.

Just curious if chmod 666 works. [he asks with a devilish grin]

The numbers are user, group, world. Each bit means something. So you add the bits up, read=4, write=2, and execute=1. If you have execute access to a directory, but not read access, you can see directory information about the files in that directory, but you can't read the files. Execute access can be thought of as search access on a directory. If you have a directory with execute and not read, you can execute the file if you know its name, but you can't find out any files names if you don't know them.

Protection can apply down through the directory tree from the mount. So it could be possible that Oracle needs proper access to something under the mount directory in order to run, for example, querying something to find out what script to run for the platform. It's been too long since I've played with the installs to remember if this is actually what is going on.

There are also subtle things that can happen using umask 022, as well as some group protections - and I think Solaris allows different group ID mechanisms to be used when mounting. Consider also that unix finds the first matching group in /etc/group, to be completely confused.

Or "see your system administrator."

Oh yeah, is it a UFS file system? The mount will always use the protection of the root directory of the filesystem, not the mount point. Perhaps other filesystems do the same.

ll -a /

jg

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