Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Installing Oracle 8.1.7 on RedHat 7.2
I mailed my comments and tweaks to Bruno and he recommended I post them here. So here they are (with his responses):
On Mon, 04 Feb 2002, Brian Fenton wrote:
<blockquote> 1. You say:
"Use a text editor to edit the shell-mods.sh file in the /etc directory. You
can download a prototype of the shell-mods.sh.txt file". You provide a link
to the file.
But then further down, you say:
"Add the following lines to /etc/shell-mods.sh:"
Some of the values you give for the variables are different from the ones in
the shell-mods.sh.txt file. For example, the PATH variable has an extra
$ORACLE_HOME/ctx/lib:. in the file. Some of the other variables are
different too.
Also, it might be a good idea to comment out the following line in the file
because it's not needed until after the install:
export NLS_LANG=NLS_LANG_V
</blockquote>
Yes, the '/etc/shell-mods.sh' part is not very clear, and I go back several
times over that file. I should limit the mention of the content of it to
only one time!
<blockquote> 2. The next one isn't incorrect, but I stupidly missed it. It might be a
good idea to make it more explicit for stupid readers like me! You correctly
mention that the runInstaller script is located in install/linux on the
cd-rom. However, between that and telling the reader to actually run the
program, you mention a few other things about the compat files and glibc
etc. - in the mean-time of course, the stupid reader (me!) has forgotten to
go the install/linux directory and instead runs the runInstaller from the
root of the CD. I think it would be helpful to remind again about the path
where you say the following:
"Now we are ready to run the installer of Oracle.
$ ./runInstaller"
</blockquote>
True!!! It's a VERY important information that gets lost in the amount of text.
This is very good! Thanks!
<blockquote> 3. This next one was a problem for me. After the Summary screen in the OUI,
the user is asked to run root.sh. The first thing I noticed is that you tell
the user to do an "su -" to change to root. I think maybe it should be just
an "su" with no "-" because you want to keep the Oracle user's settings.
Otherwise the SID is not set in root's environment etc.
</blockquote>
Yes, you are right ... The fact is that I also have the same env set for root
(pointing to shell-mods.sh) but that is only my personal settings and not
the recommended one. This is also a very good comment!
<blockquote> 4. More importantly than that, I found that the root.sh script I had was
broken! I got the following error:
Running Oracle8 root.sh script...
./root.sh: command substitution: line 1: unexpected EOF while looking for
matching `''
./root.sh: command substitution: line 2: syntax error: unexpected end of
file
./root.sh: [: !=: unary operator expected
</blockquote>
The following environment variables are set as:
<blockquote> ORACLE_OWNER= oracle
ORACLE_HOME= /apps/oracle/product/8.1.7
ORACLE_SID= acs817
I fixed this by downloading a correct version of root.sh from
http://www.pawprint.net/linux/root.sh and editing the ORACLE_HOME value
(twice) in that script.
Of course, you have to keep the Installer window open during all this
downloading and editing!
It's interesting that you never got this error...
</blockquote>
I will replace the root.sh file then... I am not sure why that one is broken (the
one you get from the site). Damned! I see ... in previous revisions of the docs
I have a link to download a different version of the root.sh ... I don't know why
I stupidely deleted that! Thanks!
<blockquote> 5. The next problem I had was a real bummer and it was really a miracle that
got me out of it! It was during the Listener Configuration. I selected No
and suddenly the program hung on me. Thinking it was doing something I left
it for 30 minutes and came back and it was still hanging. I nearly cried
after having gotten so far in the install! For some reason, I decided to
check what processes were running on the machine, one caught my eye: the
listener process. For no reason, I decided to type "lsnrctl stop" (logged in
as oracle) which is the command to stop the listener. Immediately, the
installer program stopped hanging and returned to me! As I said, a miracle.
I was then able to continue on with my install. Whew!
</blockquote>
This should go in the troubleshooting section since I had that same problem once
while installing on RedHat 7.1 but I couldn't reproduce it anymore ... Don't know
why ... This also good advice.
Thanks a lot!!!
