Installing Oracle 10gR1 on SuSE SLES-9

This is a quick guide written for the Installfest at LinuxWorld Boston, to help with installing and configuring the Oracle Database Server 10gR1 (10.1.0.3.0) on the evaluation version of Novell's SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 for x86.

Additional Resources

Arun Singh at Novell maintains an excellent guide to installing Oracle on SLES 9 here:
http://ftp.novell.com/partners/oracle/docs/10gR1_sles9_install.pdf
as well as many other install guides which can be found here:
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseserver/oracle/documents.html

Installing the orarun Package

Making use of the orarun package will save quite a lot of typing. Install the orarun package from SuSE SLES-9 CD3, either using YaST (which is the preferred way as it will find all the dependencies for you), or if you are familiar with rpm by using:

  rpm -i /media/cdrom/suse/i586/orarun-1.8-109.5.i586.rpm \
         /media/cdrom/suse/i586/libaio-devel-0.3.98-18.3.i586.rpm

After installing orarun, make sure that the packages in the following list of mandatory packages are installed. Some of these packages may have already been installed as part of the orarun package installation.

Mandatory Packages

  glibc-devel
  gcc
  gcc-c++
  libaio
  libaio-devel
  make
  openmotif
  openmotif-libs

Recommended Packages

  bison
  flex
  mozilla

Enable the oracle account

After installing the orarun package, the account for the oracle user is normally disabled. To enable it, change the shell for the oracle user from /bin/false to /bin/bash, either using YaST user administration, or by editing the file /etc/passwd. Also, give the oracle user a password, and add the oracle user to the new oinstall and dba groups (which were created when the orarun package was installed), as follows:

  /usr/sbin/usermod -g oinstall -G dba oracle

Set up the oracle user environment

Let's have a look at the configuration files of the orarun package:

  rpm -ql orarun

As we're using bash here, let's edit the configuration file:

  /etc/profile.d/oracle.sh

Let's modify the default setting for ORACLE_HOME from the default:

  ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/9ir2

to what Oracle 10gR1 will expect, which is:

  ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/10.1.0/db_1

You might also like to modify the entries for ORACLE_SID and ORACLE_BASE to your taste, although the defaults will work.

Set the kernel parameters required for a successful oracle install using the following two commands, as root. The first command uses the rcoracle script to set the parameters for the current running kernel, and the second command uses chkconfig to enable that script to set the parameters upon the next system reboot.

  /usr/sbin/rcoracle start
  /sbin/chkconfig oracle on

Check that the contents of /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax have been increased to 3294967296.

It might be simplest at this point to restart your window manager as the new oracle user, or perhaps launch a new session and login as the oracle user, as the remainder of this document will assume that you're running as oracle, and that the environment settings from /etc/profile.d/oracle.sh are in effect.

Launch the Oracle Universal Installer

Note that the current working directory should not be /media/cdrom when launching the installer, as it may be necessary to switch CD's during the install.

Launch the installer as the new oracle user as follows:

  mount /media/cdrom
  (cd $HOME && /media/cdrom/runInstaller)

Wait for the Oracle Universal Installer graphical screen to appear, and follow the usual steps in the installation guide. The only thing that might be worth mentioning here is that on slower systems (like laptops), after completing the first page and pressing Next..., you may find that the installer window disappears from the screen completely for a second or two before reappearing with the second page. Once the installation is complete, the installer should have created a sample database, and started up some services.

At the end of the database installation, don't forget to click on the Password Management... button and use the GUI interface to unlock a few demo accounts (scott, hr, sh, oe).

If it is not already started, start up the dbconsole using:

  emctl start dbconsole

If the Enterprise Manager dbconsole doesn't start, please inspect the EMD_URL entry in the file:

  $ORACLE_HOME/`hostname -f`_$ORACLE_SID/sysman/config/emd.properties

Check that the EMD_URL entry is valid by looking closely to check that it contains a machine name, followed by a colon, followed by a port number 1830 like in this example:

  EMD_URL=http://your_host_name.your_domain_name:1830/emd/main

Once dbconsole has started, connect to it using the mozilla browser here:

  http://your_host_name.your_domain_name:5500/em

You can also use http://localhost:5500/em if you're on the console, of course. Pretty much all the routine database administration tasks, and many performance tuning tasks can be done via this dbconsole browser interface, without ever going back to the command line.

Another convenient web interface is iSQL*Plus. It can be especially useful if you need to administer an oracle database over a high latency connection (dial-up or satellite):

  http://your_host_name.your_domain_name:5560/isqlplus/dba

Configuring hugepages

Configuring hugepages in the following way is optional and not required for a successful install, but it can give better performance when running a system with a large SGA and a large number of oracle users.

To figure out how many hugepages will be needed, you'll need to know the size of the oracle SGA. The SGA is the shared memory segment the oracle instance uses. Either use the sqlplus command show sga, or from a linux console use the command ipcs to view the SGA size.

For example, the default SGA size of an 10.1.0.3.0 installation on a machine with 512MB memory is 289406976 bytes, so to calculate the number of hugepages to preallocate, we'll need to divide this number by the Hugepagesize. On x86 systems without PAE enabled, Hugepagesize can be read from /proc/meminfo and is 4096 kB. So we need to divide by 289406976 by 4194304 to arrive at 69 hugepages.

The best way to configure hugepages is to configure them at boot time before booting SuSE SLES-9. To do the boot time configuration, edit the file

  /boot/grub/menu.lst

and add the following string to the kernel line:

  hugepages=70

Reboot the system and check that cat /proc/meminfo shows HugePages_Total of 70.

For hugepages, the entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst for Linux should look something like the following, but will depend on course on your SLES-9 installation. Note: don't break the kernel line into multiple lines as shown here, it should all be on one single line.

title Linux
    kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 vga=0x311 
      selinux=0 hugepages=70 splash=silent resume=/dev/sda1 
      elevator=cfq showopts
    initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd

Another thing that needs to be done to configure hugepages is to allow the SHM_HUGETLB flag (04000) in the shmget() call for non-root users, by doing one of the following, as root:

  echo "1" > /proc/sys/vm/disable_cap_mlock

or:

  sysctl -w vm.disable_cap_mlock="1"

Both of the above commands will only make the change valid until the next reboot. If you prefer to make it permanent, then you must create the following file:

  /etc/sysctl.conf

The file /etc/sysctl.conf will need to contain the following line:

vm.disable_cap_mlock = 1

To cause the settings stored in /etc/sysctl.conf to take effect on reboot of your newly-installed SLES-9 system, one of the following commands needs to be issued (only once) to configure the boot.sysctl script to be a member of the set of boot-time initialisation scripts of the SuSE "boot script concept":

  insserv /etc/init.d/boot.sysctl

or:

  chkconfig boot.sysctl on

Latest Revision

The latest revision of this document will be maintained at:

http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/InstallfestGuideSLES9

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-- PeterKnaggs - 09 Feb 2005
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