Forum OpenACS Development: Good Oracle News

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1: Good Oracle News
Posted by Pascal Scheffers on 05/10/01 10:04 PM
From the too-much-time-on-your-hands dept.

I managed to move my Oracle 8.1.6 from RH6.2 to RH7.1!
I read somewhere that the linking part in the oracle installation is what causes the trouble, glibc 2.2 is backward compatible with 2.1, so I just tried it.

It is very simple:

  • Install RH6.2
  • Install oracle as described in the ACS install guide
  • Install RH7.1 on a different partition, reuse /home
  • Add the user oracle and groups dba and oinstall with the same numeric ids they had in RH6.1 (or else you need to chown a lot of files)
  • Mount your /ora partition on RH7.1 (as /ora)
  • Copy the old 'oracle' home dir to the RH7.1 /home (or do as I do: use the same /home partition for RH6.2 and 7.1 [be caferul with that, though])
  • copy the oracle8i and listener8i scripts from rh6.2/etc/rc.d/init.d to rh7.1/etc/init.d (yes, without the /rc.d/, they changed that)
  • Do some things I forgot to mention (probably)
  • try a 'su - oracle', 'svrmgrl', 'connect internal', 'startup'
  • start your AOLServer on RH7.1 (no changes needed). Done.
I think this procedure is *much* *much* simpler that trying to get oracle to link with glibc 2.1 on RH7.1.

Anyway. Now I can test the oracle things for OpenACS on RH7.1. Hoopy!

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2: Response to Good Oracle News (response to 1)
Posted by Petru Paler on 05/10/01 10:19 PM

I can confirm this works well. I have a production database which was moved from 6.2 to 7.0 and works just fine (it was installed for testing on a machine with 6.2, then a new server was purchased and I put 7.0 on it (plus patches)). Being lazy, I remembered it's only about the linking, so I simply copied it over with rsync. Works like a charm.

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3: Response to Good Oracle News (response to 1)
Posted by Patrick Haggood on 05/11/01 04:50 AM
Cool beans!

Any advantages being on 7.1?  I just did an installation and used 6.2 after trying for about a week to get it going on 7.0 .  Seems to run okay, but I think 256M is about the minimum you can use with Oracle and I'll probably be bumping this PIII box up to ..5GB very soon.  I installed ACS4's PhotoAlbum and tried uploading a photo a few hours ago, it was still churning and top showed Oralce going up past 240M

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4: Response to Good Oracle News (response to 1)
Posted by Pascal Scheffers on 05/11/01 10:20 AM
Advantages to RH6.2? I think some important security issues (mainly kernel), better support for new hardware, XWindows 4.x, recent version of KDE. So for my desktop-development-environment a definite improvement. As for a dedicated server? You need to patch a couple of things, move to kernel 2.2.19 for a production machine. etc.

Oracle performance on my Athlon 700 - 256Mb box is good enough. Having 5Gig is cool for production machines, but remember that a very large part of your DB writes are 100% dependant on disk speed. The initdb will still take *long* no matter how much RAM you have. If you have that much RAM you might consider creating a 2.5G RAM disk, do the initdb and load datamodel on the RAM drive and then move everything to a real disk partition. Expect lightning speeds :)

If you're going for 5Gig RAM, consider buying two or more extra harddrives and make a RAID partition for the oracle databases (dunno which RAID level)

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5: Oracle 8.1.7 on Red Hat 7.1 (response to 1)
Posted by Steve Woodcock on 05/11/01 10:31 AM
I got Oracle running on RH7.1 ok, following these instructions, with a few small changes:
  • I didn't recompile the kernel. No problems with shared mem.
  • I used the IBM 1.1.8 JDK
  • I didn't install the glibc2.1 toolkit, but used the procedure at the top of this
  • The suggested .bash_profile for the Oracle user has some bugs (I think) in it: 
    PATH=${PATH}:${ORACLE_HOME}/bin:${JAVA_HOME}:/bin
    should be 
    PATH=${PATH}:${ORACLE_HOME}/bin:${JAVA_HOME}/bin
    and 
    if [ "${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:-}" == "" ]; then
    should be 
    if [ "${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}" == "" ]; then
  • Last thing, at about 99% the installer gave an error trying to run make install against ${ORACLE_HOME}/ctx/lib/insXXX.mk -- I just cd'd to the directory and did a manual make -f insXXX.mk install which worked fine. (Sorry, I can't remember the exact name of the .mk file, but there's only two in that directory and only one of them begins ins_)
The very last thing, make sure you have 
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL
in your AOLserver startup script otherwise loadjava (and hence the .sqlj parts of the OpenACS install) won't work.

Hmph, it's a lot easier than it sounds!

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6: Response to Good Oracle News (response to 1)
Posted by Ken Kennedy on 05/12/01 12:55 AM
Regarding RAID levels: 0+1 (disk striping and mirroring) is what we usually push for. It provides both high I/O performance and high reliability. Downside: you need double your disk (20 GB to provide 10GB of 0+1 storage). RAID level 5 (data and parity striping across disks) also gives high reliability and fast reads, but reduces write performance. It needs less "overhead" storage as well.