Category Archives: Linux

Adding VNC Server to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3

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Time Required: 10 minutes

Class Materials:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 64-bit install media

The following steps show how to install a VNC server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3.

VNC provides a remote desktop solution, allowing users to connect to the Linux system remotely and being able to use the native Linux desktop.

In many Linux distributions, a VNC server is installed by default, but with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x the package must be manually added.

Note: Although the test system for this blog was a RHEL 6.3 system, these steps should work with any RHEL 6.0 or CentOS 6.0 and above Linux system.

First, locate and mount your RHEL 6.3 install media.

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Installing Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c 12.1.0.2 on CentOS 6.3 on VMware Workstation 8

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In this blog post, we are going to install Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c (12.1.0.2) on CentOS 6.3 64-bit using VMware Workstation 8.

Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) has been around since the 8.0 days. What started out as a fairly light-weight client-server GUI tool for managing database functions has morphed into a complex and brittle mess of poor interface design and sloppy coding.

Although 12c is a step up from the god-awful OEM 11g, the hapless Oracle DBA is still left with a muddled mess of an interface and a tool that is likely to cause more headaches than it solves.

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Renaming a Linux Host running Oracle 11gR2

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In this blog post, we are going to rename the Linux host name of an existing Oracle 11gR2 system. We can also use this technique to change the IP address of our host.

Host renames are a useful technique in virtualized environments, where vCenter may be used to clone entire hosts including the Oracle databases installed on them. This technique will also work with physical hosts should you wish to simply rename an existing Oracle host.

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Silent Install of Oracle 11.2.0.3 on RedHat 6.0.

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In this blog post, we are going to silently install Oracle 11.2.0.3 64-bit on RedHat 6.0 using VMWare Workstation 8.

This install demonstration is going to use the silent install mode for all components. At least within the guest VM, at no point will we use a GUI for the install. We will need to use the VMWare GUI to create the VM, install the OS and add disks.

With the increasing use of VMWare, many organizations are looking to automate the deployment of Oracle database environments for development, test or validation. And increasingly DBAs are being tasked with automating the provisioning process.

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Error while detecting Oracle Grid Infrastructure. ASMCA needs Oracle Grid Infrastructure to configure ASM

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You installed the Grid Infrastructure using the silent software-only option:

./runInstaller -silent -force -responseFile $HOME/grid.rsp

 
When you try to create the ASM instance and a diskgroup, the asmca command fails with:

Error while detecting Oracle Grid Infrastructure. 
ASMCA needs Oracle Grid Infrastructure to configure ASM.

 
This is because the CRS components still need to be configured, you can do this as the root user as follows:

[root@localhost ~]# $ORACLE_HOME/perl/bin/perl -I \
  $ORACLE_HOME/perl/lib -I \
  $ORACLE_HOME/crs/install $ORACLE_HOME/crs/install/roothas.pl
Using configuration parameter file: /u01/app/11.2.0/grid/crs/install/crsconfig_params
Creating trace directory
LOCAL ADD MODE 
Creating OCR keys for user 'oracle', privgrp 'oinstall'..
Operation successful.
LOCAL ONLY MODE 
Successfully accumulated necessary OCR keys.
Creating OCR keys for user 'root', privgrp 'root'..
Operation successful.
CRS-4664: Node localhost successfully pinned.
Adding Clusterware entries to upstart

localhost     2013/01/10 15:06:48     /u01/app/11.2.0/grid/cdata/localhost/backup_20130110_150648.olr
Successfully configured Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a Standalone Server

 
Once this is done, the asmca command can be run successfully.

PRVF-5507 during Oracle 11.2.0.3 install

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During the install of Oracle 11.2.0.3, the installer pre-requisite check fails on the NTP daemon configuration.

Network Time Protocol (NTP) – This task verifies cluster time synchronization on clusters that use Network Time Protocol (NTP). 
Error: – PRVF-5507 : NTP daemon or service is not running on any node but NTP configuration file exists on the following node(s): localhost  –
Cause:  The configuration file was found on at least one node though no NTP daemon or service was running.  –
Action:  If you plan to use CTSS for time synchronization then NTP configuration must be uninstalled on all nodes of the cluster.

To address this, remove the /etc/ntp.conf file.  This will allow the use of CTSS for time synchronization.

[root@localhost ~]# cd /etc
[root@localhost etc]# mv ntp.conf ntp.conf.bak

Java HotSpot Error – [ld-linux-x86-64.so.2+0x14d70] on Oracle Install – RedHat 6.0 on VMWare

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While trying to install Oracle on a Red Hat 6.0 system, running on VMWare, you might encounter the following error:

# An unexpected error has been detected by HotSpot Virtual Machine:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00007fd0b80d0d70, pid=2951, tid=140533187077904
#
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (1.5.0_30-b03 mixed mode)
# Problematic frame:
# C  [ld-linux-x86-64.so.2+0x14d70]
#
# An error report file with more information is saved as hs_err_pid2951.log
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
#   http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport/crash.jsp
#

To resolve this problem, execute the following before launching runInstaller

$ export LD_BIND_NOW=1

 
The installer will run normally.

This problem has been reported with Oracle 11.2.0.1 and Oracle 11.2.0.3

Installing Oracle 11.2.0.3 on CentOS 6.3 on VMware Workstation 8.

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In this blog post, we are going to install Oracle 11.2.0.3 64-bit on CentOS 6.3 using VMware Workstation 8. Given that Oracle no longer offers ASMLib for non Oracle branded Linux, we are going to use UDEV rules to manage the disk presentation to ASM.

In my 10-part post on installing Oracle RAC on VMware Workstation I deliberately used an excessive number of screen shots to guide readers through the process. This time I am going to assume you are already comfortable with the Oracle GUI installers, and will skip over excess details to condense this down into a single blog post.

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Using Oracle HCC Compression on VMware Workstation without Exadata or ZFSSA disk

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Hybrid Columnar Compression is one of the new features that Oracle has been touting to persuade DBAs on the virtues of their Exadata and ZFSSA storage solutions.

As stated in my bio, I currently get paid by EMC, but this blog post is not another critique of Oracle sales massaging technical numbers on the assumption that you can use HCC for OLTP loads.

Rather, this is a USE AT YOUR OWN RISK method to explore what HCC can and cannot do. Using this method will render your databases unsupported by Oracle and you must NOT do this on any production or mission critical system. Please note I accept no responsibility for anyone destroying critical data from trying any of this.

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scsi_id on CentOS 6 on VMware returns null

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You may find the scsi_id command returns a null result in CentOS 6 or RHEL 6 on VMware.

[root@localhost ~]# scsi_id -g -u -d /dev/sdb
[root@localhost ~]#

 
The problem here is that VMware Workstation does not provide unique SCSI identifiers to the virtual SCSI devices. We need to modify the VMX file to make this happen by adding the following directive:

disk.EnableUUID = "TRUE"

 
Restart the VM and now the scsi_id command should work:

[root@localhost ~]# scsi_id -g -u -d /dev/sdb
36000c2980c56d98cc5150a0ac103058d