Installing Oracle Grid Control 10 release 2 on SuSE 9.3 ES

With all those fancy plug-ins for Microsoft tools release 2 of Oracle Grid Control 10g seems to be a must-have. However, according to many postings on the internet, installation on SuSE Linux is quite a job and release 2 is not (yet?) available for Windows. So, there’s a challenge that I couldn’t resist and I decided to try and install it on SuSE Linux 9.3 (SLES9). The result after a couple of times installing, removing and re-installing was a nice working grid control.

Here’s how I did it.

First I installed SLES9 on a Dell 1850 server. A ‘lazy’ install, I used YaST and selected the following options:

• Basic Runtime System,
• YaST,
• Graphical Base System,
• Linux Tools,
• KDE Desktop,
• C/C++ Compiler and Tools and
• Basis Sound Libraries and Tools.

It may be possible to tweak this installation but this is based on the SuSE documentation and it does the job. I did not install any service packs at this time. Also important: choose the server name carefully and make sure it’s in your DNS. During installation and configuration the host- and domainname are put in the configurationfiles so namesolving is very important.

As an alternative you can add the server name in the hosts file on the client(s).

Next step is installing the Oracle software. There are a couple of things that you have to do to make sure that everything works fine. First of all the hardware. GC Release 2 is very heavy on resources so a dual processor machine would be best and you need at least 1GB memory and 4,5GB of disk space.

Another issue is adjusting the kernel parameters. Most of them are sufficient except the shmmax (change to 2147483648) and semopm (change to 100); I did this in the /etc/sysctl.conf file. There are no problems with the versions of the packages; they are all at the correct level or higher after installing SLES9. One exception is openmorif21 but that gave me no trouble. If you choose to add it, make sure that you have openmotif21-2.1.30-11 or higher.

A nasty one (known bug and “patch” is downloadable via metalink), was the modification of the /etc/hosts file. You have to remove all IPV6 entries (or comment it) the line ‘::1  localhost ipv6-localhost ipv6-loopback’ or you will have a very ugly JAVA error.

Also the fact that libdb.so.2 is not available seems to be a problem for the Oracle Universal Installer. The solution: ‘ln -sn libdb.so.3 libdb.so.2’ (creating a symbolic link). It’s so easy to fool Oracle….

If you choose to use a new database for the Management Server Repository, like I did, you have to manually create an empty /etc/oratab file. The installer shows an error message if it is missing and is does not create one.

Last but not least, a workaround for a known bug: before starting the installer set the environment variable OPATCH_NO_FUSER to FALSE. Reason for this is a workaround for bug 4898745 as documented on Metalink in document 352507.1. It says: ” ‘fuser’ is used by OPatch to detect active processes. So presence of ‘fuser’ executable is essential. It should be present in /sbin or /usr/sbin or should be present in the PATH. Another workaround is to set OPATCH_NO_FUSER environment variable to FALSE. This will bypass the active process checks by OPatch.”.

Finally you can start the Oracle Universal Installer and install Grid Control. This is rather straight forward, just select the things you need en click ‘Next’. One thing to know: the password policy demands that your passwords contain at least one number and start with an alphanumeric character.

Installation and automatic configuration should give no problems…except these things:

1. The last step in the configuration process, the configuration of the agent, returns an error. However, as far as I can see everything seems to work fine.
2. During the execution of root.sh, the installer tries to create a hard link S99gcstartup in /etc/rc3.d to the file /etc/init.d/gcstartup. In SuSE the directory /etc/rc3.d does not exist, this has to be /etc/init.d/rc3.d.

Installation is now complete and you can enter the Grid Control website on http://<servername>:<port>/em with user sysman and the password that you entered during installation.

One final issue: after a reboot you must start Grid Control manually. Implementing the ‘orarun’ script from SuSE might make that easier to do. More info on orarun on this page