Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: A tip for anyone installing Oracle 9iR2 on RHEL4....

Collapse
Posted by Janine Ohmer on
Here's an even bigger gotcha that people should be aware of.

There is apparently some very bad mojo that arises from a combination of the older glibc from the compat RPMs required by the Oracle install and the setting of LD_ASSUME_KERNEL to 2.4.19. Once these two things are in place, installing any RPM will cause the RPM database to be severely corrupted and unusable.

The problem is copiously described here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=101603

But they seem to have thought they fixed it for RHEL4. Not so, as Mike can corrupt his RPM database at will just by setting LD_ASSUME_KERNEL.

This situation is relatively easy to avoid if you aren't lazy like me and don't set all your environment variables in /etc/profile. Only users who will be accessing Oracle need to have them set, and root generally isn't one of those users.