MacLochlainns Weblog

This is a sample installation for Red Hat Linux AS 4 (Advanced Server). It includes installation steps (with screen shots) and server configuration options for an Oracle 10g, Oracle 11g, and Oracle Applications 12. All the installations were done as virtual machines on a Mac Pro running Mac OS X, using VMWare Fusion 2.x virtualization software. You can find the VMWare Fusion steps here.

A cautionary note with Red Hat AS 4, you must have a valid subscription to complete these steps. They once had a broad academic license (with up to 60 installs per academic) but now its quite limited with a single academic license (subscription) per each fee. You won’t be able to update the installation once you’ve completed the base install without a valid subscription. If you’re an academic (that includes students), they’ll disallow the use of any email except a valid university email account. They’ll validate your email before you can proceed with updating the system. An alternative is Oracle Linux, which is free (and more or less equivalent to Red Hat AS 4).

After the VMWare configuration, these are the installation steps (a cautionary warning, there are a lot of screen shots in this post). The post is in four segments. The first walks you through the Red Hat 4 installation and package selection. The second walks you through the post installation configuration steps before you install Oracle, and it include general housekeeping not included in the Oracle Database Quick Installation Guide, 11g Release 1. The third deals with the kernel settings required by Oracle 11g. The fourth walks you through setting up your environment file and verifying you can connect to Oracle within the Red Hat 4 environment. The fifth walks you through nuance linked to a VMWare Fusion virtual machine.

Installing Red Hat 4 (30 steps)

1. The first installation screen you should see follows below. If it isn’t displayed in about 10 to 20 seconds, there is probably an error with your VMWare Fusion configuration steps. You may need to repeat those. If you get to this screen, simply click the Return or Enter key to continue.

2. Unless you’re unsure of the integrity of your media, you should click the Tab key to the Skip selection and then click the Enter or Return key.

3. That begins the installation. You’ll then see all other commands enabled for your mouse. Click the Next button to proceed.

4. Choose the language for your installation. Then, click the Next button to continue the installation.

5. Like the prior selection, this one involves your primary language for your keyboard. Choose the correct language and then click the Next button to continue the installation.

6. Now you must choose whether or not you want to partition the space or accept automatic partitioning. My preference is to manually partition. Click Automatically partition radio button if you want the defaults, or click the Manually partition with Disk Druid button to set the values yourself.

7. You should see that the partition table doesn’t exist, and you’ll receive a dialog asking you to initialize the drive. Click the Yes button to continue.

8. If you chose automatic partitioning, you’ll see a progress dialog as the partition is built. If you chose manual partition, you’ll receive the following dialog. You can choose the New button to add partitions until you’ve added them all.

I’d recommend the following settings for a sample 100 GB disk system for an Oracle 10g or 11g installation:

9. The next screen is for the boot loader, typically you should accept the default values. Click the Next button to continue.

10. Accept the DHCP configuration initially because you can convert it to a static port after the installation. Click the Next button to continue.

11. By default the firewall is enabled, you can disable it and save yourself some time later or leave it enforce to learn how to configure it. You should check the Remote Logon (SSH) and Web Server (HTTP, HTTPS) check boxes, so that you can remotely login, redirect XWindow to external consoles, and configure Zend Core for Oracle. Click the Next button to continue.

12.Additional language support is available. You can check any languages that you want to enable, and then click the Next button to continue.

13. You opt for a timezone in the next form. Choose one and then click the Next button to continue.

14. You enter the root user password twice and click the Next button to continue.

15. The default packages don’t provide everything you need. You should click the Customize software packages to be installed radio button and then the Next button to continue.

16. You should select the following packages for  your installation and click the Next button to continue.

17. You’ve selected everything, now click the Next button to install it.

18. The following dialog runs while formatting the partitions. It varies how long based on the size of the disk you’re formatting.

19. The following screen runs while the packages are installed on the operating system.

20. You see the following screen when the installation phase completes. Click the Reboot button to continue with the post installation configuration steps.

21. After the operating system reboots, you see the following screen. Click the Next button to continue with the post installation configuration steps.

22. Choose the Yes radio button to accept the license agreement, and click the Next button to continue.

23. Verify the date and time, the click the Network Time Protocol tab to synchronize the clock.

24. Choose a server and click the Next button to continue.

25. Choose 800×600 and proceed if you’re inside a VMWare Fusion virtual machine because it’ll change when you run the WMWare Tools later in the configuration. If you’re on a native machine, the install typically recognizes the monitor correctly. It general can’t detect the resolution when connected through an OmniView switch. You may opt to connect the monitor directly during the install to avoide this problem. After you choose a resolution, click the Next button to continue.

26. The next screen requires you to have a Red Hat login account. If you don’t remember it, log into the Red Hat site and recover it. It differs from your Red Hat account.

27. At this point, you’ll be prompted for an installation key. Only provide it if you’re installing Red Hat 5 or greater because it isn’t required for Red Hat 4.

28. You are prompted to install VMWare Tools packages if you’re running this instance in a VMWare Fusion.

29. You should connect to the Red Hat virtual machine as the root user. You click on Virtual Machine in the VMWare menu, and choose Install VMWare Tools from the drop down menu. It will put a zip file in the /media/cdrecorder mount point. You can unzip the file with the following command:

# tar -zxvf /media/cdrecorder/VMwareTools-e.x.p-116369.tar.gz ~root

After you extract the file, run the following as the root user:

# ~root/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl

Generally, you should accept every default but I’d suggest that you skip the experimental product at the end of the prompts. Even after you install the VMWare Tools, Red Hat 4 will prompt you to run it again. You won’t gain anything by rerunning the script. Also, the Unity display option doesn’t work with Red Hat 4.

30. The next step is to click on the flashing red explanation mark and patch the system to the current release and kernel. After you’ve done that you should configure the /etc/sysctl.conf to support installing either an Oracle 10g or 11g instance.

Post Installation (9 steps)

Before you begin the Oracle preconfiguration steps, you should convert the network from DHCP to a static IP address. You should now create an administrative user account, and then logout as root and logon as that administrative user.

You configure the network, as follows:

1. Navigate to the fedora Applications choice in the top left hand corner and choose System Settings selection, which launches a context dialog where you should choose the Network selection, as shown:

2. If you connected as the root user, you will immediately see the Network Configuration dialog (which you can launch from the command line as /usr/bin/system-config-network). If you connected as another user, you’ll be prompted for the root password as shown in the dialog box.

3. You’re on the Devices tab by default, click the Hosts tab. If you see localhost localhost.localdomain Hosts tab, you should connect as the root user in a terminal window and edit the /etc/hosts file.

At the command line, switch user to root like this and provide the password:

# su - root

Add the following line to the /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1 desired_hostname desired_hostname.desired_domain_name

These will be pick up as the current values and they’ll be used by oem during the installation of the Oracle Database 11g later in the installation. You should make no changes from the Hosts tab.

4. From the DNS tab, you should see the following. Leave the localhost.localdomain alone, it means that the /etc/nsswitch.conf file has the following line in it.

hosts files dns

This line means that the operating system checks the /etc/hosts file first before DNS. It’s the easiest way to work with test systems that you take up and take down. In a VMWare Fusion installation, the primary DNS server is also the gateway (if you doubt that you can switch user to root and run the traceroute utility).

You should note the IP number because you’ll need it later in these steps.

5. Click the Devices tab, and you should see an active eth0 network card. Click the Edit button to continue.

6. You arrive at the Ethernet Device dialog when you click the Edit button. Automatically obtain IP address should be set like it is in the screen shot.

Click the Statically set IP address radio button to select it. Enter a valid IP address (for VMWare Fusion 2.x the valid static range is 172.16.153.3 to 172.16.153.127), subnet mask (discoverable by using the ifconfig command in a terminal window), and default gateway (VMWare Fusion 2.x uses 172.16.153.2 as the gateway).

7. Click the window close icon in the top right corner to exit and save the work. You will see the following dialog and you click the Yes button to continue.

8. Now that you’ve approved the changes, the utility prompts you to restart the network and check them with the Information dialog. Click the OK button to continue.

9. Restarting the machine can be problematic (or at least tedious) if you’ve made an error. You should consider trying to restart the network while you’re still connected and capable of making changes. You open a terminal session, switch user to the root user, and enter the root password, like:

# su - root

Then, you can restart the network with the following command:

# /etc/init.d/network restart
Shutting down interface eth0:                [  OK  ]
Shutting down loopback interface:            [  OK  ]
Setting network parameters:                  [  OK  ]
Bringing up loopback interface:              [  OK  ]
Bringing up interface eth0:                  [  OK  ]

Even after restarting the network services, an attempt to install Oracle would fail to recognize the IP address as static. You’ll need to reboot the operating system to have a static IP system.

Kernel Configuration for Oracle

The Oracle Database Quick Installation Guide, 11g Release 1 notes are very good but they’re missing one of four RPMS that you must manually install. The missing RPM is the unixODBC-devel-2.2.11 for the release you’re installing. This install is 64 bit, therefore they’re using the x86_64. They are the following:

# rpm -ivh elfutils-libelf-devel-0.97.1-5.x86_64.rpm
# rpm -ivh unixODBC-devel-2.2.11-1.RHEL4.1.x86_64.rpm
# rpm -ivh libaio-devel-0.3.105-2.x86_64.rpm
# rpm -ivh sysstat-5.0.5-19.el4.x86_64.rpm

2. After patching the Operating System, you’ll need to configure the Red Hat 4.0 kernel configuration file, known as sysctl.conf. You should enter any missing parameters, like the following:

# Kernel sysctl configuration file for Red Hat Linux
#
# For binary values, 0 is disabled, 1 is enabled.  See sysctl(8) and
# sysctl.conf(5) for more details.
 
# Controls IP packet forwarding
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 0
 
# Controls source route verification
net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 1
 
# Do not accept source routing
net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_source_route = 0
 
# Controls the System Request debugging functionality of the kernel
kernel.sysrq = 0
 
# Oracle specific kernel parameters
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
 
# Oracle specific network parameters
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000
net.core.rmem_default = 4194304
net.core.rmem_max = 4194304
net.core.wmem_default = 262144
net.core.wmem_max = 262144
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 262144 262144 262144
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4194304 4194304 4194304
 
#fs.file-max = 65534
 
# Controls whether core dumps will append the PID to the core filename.
# Useful for debugging multi-threaded applications.
kernel.core_uses_pid = 1
fs.file-max = 6553600

Pending update …