Install Oracle 9i binaries

Overview

This note explains how to install Oracle 9i Database Server (Oracle9i) release 3 (patchset 9.0.2.4) on Linux Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1.

This document describes the installation process, step by step. At the end of this process, you will have the Oraclie 9i Database Server binaries installed on your machine, and your oracle user configured to use it. It does not cover the installation of the database itself, which is application specific.

Certification Issue

NOTE: Oracle products are certified to work on specific platforms only. You can check which products are certified by Oracle on which platforms at http://metalink.oracle.com (see "Certify and Availability"). Current Linux platforms are RedHat Advanced Server 2.1 and United Linux 1.0. CERN IT/DB only supports installation on RedHat Advanced Server 2.1 ES/AS.

It means that if you install Oracle9i Database on another platform than RedHat Advanced Server, like CERN standard Linux for instance, you will only have limited support from Oracle or possible none at all in case of problems. Requirements on the machine

In order to simplify support matters, we recommend the following system configuration, based on CERN standard configurations.

• It should be a disk server with 10 RAID disks, mirrored, with at least 100GB total hard disk space, but 500GB is recommended.
• It should already have Redhat Enterprise Linux 2.1 installed. Here is the configuration details that are used at CERN.
• It should also have 4 different partitions on 4 different mountpoints called
  • /ORA/dbs00
  • /ORA/dbs01
  • /ORA/dbs02
  • /ORA/dbs03

as recommended by the Oracle Flexible Architecture. All of the supplied installation and configuration scripts uses the CERN configured version of OFA. We recommend you use this structure, since that will mean you do not have to change any of the scripts.

• The oracle user should be defined on the machine, with sudo privileges.

How to get Oracle9iDB 9.2.0.4

The Oracle binaries can be found on AFS at /afs/cern.ch/project/oracle/export/rdbms/920/linux

Installation Scripts

These are available from the File download section of Savannah. You requires the Database tarball and the init-oracle rpm. Direct links:

Database
HTTP	http://wwwdb.web.cern.ch/wwwdb/savannah-files/ora-lcgt1/Database.pkg/1.0.4/Database-1.0.4.tar.gz
AFS	/afs/cern.ch/project/dbgroup/www/savannah-files/ora-lcgt1/Database.pkg/1.0.4/Database-1.0.4.tar.gz

init-oracle
HTTP	http://wwwdb.web.cern.ch/wwwdb/savannah-files/ora-lcgt1/init-oracle.pkg/1.0.4/init-oracle-1.0.4-1.noarch.rpm
AFS	/afs/cern.ch/project/dbgroup/www/savannah-files/ora-lcgt1/init-oracle.pkg/1.0.4/init-oracle-1.0.4-1.noarch.rpm

Pre-installation tasks

• Login to the machine on which you will install the database as oracle.
• Unpack the installation scripts.

You should get a directory structure as below :

    /Database-<VERSION>/
        binary-install/
            rsp_files/
        env-install/
        init-scripts/

The files you should have inside the binary-install directory are

    CERNorainstRoot.sh
    create_oracle_DB_dirs.sh
    install_oracle.sh
    install_oracle_config.sh
    install_oracle_functions.sh
    root_preinstall.sh

    metascript_root.sh

    rsp_files/
        bin_rsp_variables_to_change.txt
        enterprise_template.rsp
        oracle_oui_9204.rsp
        oracle_patch9203.rsp
        oracle_patch9204.rsp
        patch_rsp_variables_to_change.txt

The file install_oracle_config.sh contains all the variables you may want to change for your installation. So it is very important that you edit it and set the variables according to your configuration as it will be described in the installation section.

• Unpack the Oracle software files, provided as tarballs. You will need both the binary RDBMS (cd.9201.Disk*.tar) and the patch set (metalink.PSR9204.ta=r). The directory you unpack these into will be used in the installation to set the value of the MEDIA_MOUNTPOINT variable in the configuration file =install_oracle_config.sh.

Installation

• Binary Install

Firstly, go to the binary-install directory, and edit the configuration file install_oracle_config.sh. The following must be changed to suit your installation. Most of these have reasonable defaults, and only the ones marked (REQUIRED) are necessary to change.

MEDIA_MOUNTPOINT (REQUIRED)
    The location where you unpacked the Oracle binary tarballs
DOMAIN (REQUIRED)
    name of the domain of the machine (ex: cern.ch)
ORACLE_USER
    must be set to the name of the oracle user at your site (defaults to oracle)
ORACLE_GROUP
    must be set to the name of the oracle group at your site (defaults to oracle)
DISPLAY
    If you are connected without forwarding of X11 connections, this must be set to the name of the machines you have your windows on
NFS_INSTALLATION
    Set to "true" or "false" depending if you are doing an installation over NFS or not. this defaults to "false", i.e. local install
MEDIA_HOST
    Name of the machine you are installing from (NFS install only)
MEDIA_REMOTE_MOUNTPOINT
    Directory you are installing from (NFS install only)

There is a script provided (metascript_root.sh) which will run coordinate all the individual scripts that need to be run. This should be run as root:

    $ sudo ./metascript_root.sh

This will take about 30 minutes to run. The installer will create logs of all it's actions which can be found in the directory: $ORACLE_BASE/oraInventory/logs/.

• Environment Install

Now go to the env-install directory. This contains scripts that will configure your .bashrc and .cshrc startup scripts, as well as /etc/sysconfig/oracle, which is used by the init.d scripts.

To do this, you simply run the env-install script. The usage is as follows:

    usage: env-install [--base path] [--v]

    Options:
          --base    path    The path to ORACLE_BASE.  Defaults to
                            "/ORA/dbs01/oracle"
          --v               verbose mode

    Example:
           ./env-install --v

NOTE: The script needs to sudo in order to set permissions of the /etc/sysconfig/oracle file correctly.

• init.d scripts

These are supplied as an RPM (init-oracle), downloadable from the File download page. Simply install the RPM, and you will have startup/shutdown scripts available. It uses the /etc/sysconfig/oracle file that is created by the env-install script.

You now have a complete binary install of Oracle Database 9i. The next step is deploy an application specific database onto the blank binary install. Please see the relevant application specific HOWTOs on how to do this.

Uninstall Oracle

• Binary and data uninstall

Oracle mainly installs into directories below the /ORA directory, but some configuration files and generic scripts are installed into /etc and /usr/local/bin respectively. To uninstall first make sure all Oracle processes are shut down (normally, using the init.d scripts) and then execute the following commands:

    cd /ORA && rm -rf dbs00 dbs01 dbs02 dbs03
    cd /usr/local/bin && sudo rm -rf dbhome oraenv coraenv
    cd /etc && sudo rm -f oratab emtab oraInst.loc iastab

Note that in the case of the database, this will remove all data files (in /ORA/dbs03/oradata) as well as the the binaries.

• User environment uninstall

To remove the user environment, you need to manually edit the ~/.cshrc and ~/.bashrc files and remove the added section. This has the following header and footer:

    #
    # Automatically added by script: env-install
    #

    ...
    ...
    ...
    #
    # End of automatically added variables
    #

You also need to remove the sysconfig files:

    cd /etc/sysconfig && sudo rm -f oracle oracle_ias

• init.d script uninstall

If you wish to also uninstall the init.d scripts, then you can do this using rpm:

    $ sudo rpm -e init-oracle

References / Documentation

For further documentation, go directly to the Oracle Web Site: http://otn.oracle.com ("Oracle Technology Network").

For documentation in both pdf and html formats of Oracle 9i release 2 : http://otn.oracle.com/documentation/oracle9i.html.

On line manual for the installation of Oracle9i Database for Linux Advanced Server : http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/html/A96167_01/toc.htm

A short and clear guide to install Oracle on Linux (but on Red Hat 7.2) can be found at: http://www.akadia.com/services/ora_linux_install_9i.html

Contacts

For help and support on Oracle products: http://metalink.oracle.com.

For any problems with the installation: physics-database.support@cernNOSPAMPLEASE.ch