February 22, 2004: Installing Oracle 10g

I downloaded the db file for Linux from OTN and unpacked it on my Linux system. This is only a hobby system so I didn't bother about breaking my database. Because I don't have a burner on my linux system I transfered the files to a windows environment and burned it on a CD. Make sure to unset the hidden attribute of files starting with a . (period). Actually this disk doesn't contain any, but the companion has some. Since Easy CD Creator often causes me problems I use the rather old program CDRwin.
The disk contains a welcome.htm files with the installation guides. Since I already installed the version 9i and the application server most of the pre-installation tasks were not necessary :-). I only had to set the environment. I started the installer and immediately encountered the message that my Suse 8.0 system is not one of the two required distributions (Redhat AS or United Linux something). After searching OTN the solution was found easily: add a /etc/redhat_release file containing the text "Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon)". Later on I found out that other options are possible as well. The install script checks the presence of some versions of programs like binutils and others and some kernel parameters. These dependencies are described in the manual. Some of my versions were older but I decided to continue and only to upgrade these in case the installation fails,but fortunately this did not happen.
The well-known installer only asks a few questions (like Oracle home, what type of installation). I decided not to install a database because I wanted to upgrade my current database. Installation went smoothly without any problems and about half an hour later 10g was installed.
Next step was to upgrade my database. I fired up the 9i database and started the database upgrade assistant (dbua). The upgrade process took a few hous to complete and finished with just a few errors, that only appeared in the xmldb. These seemed not to be fatal because the summary showed that everything had been upgraded succesfully. What the heck, I didn't bother taking a look at the errors. I'll that when I encounter problems. I configured a listener, modified the tnsnames.ora, modified my environment script and successfully connected to the database using SQL+ :-)). I then removed my 9i install.
Next thing was the enterprise manager. The dbupgrade summary showed that it couldn't start the DBConsole. I messed around for some hours and then discovered that $ORACLE_SID had the wrong value :-(. But still I was not able to fire up the DConsole. Although a tedious job, all this trying and researching gave me an inside in the enterprise manager. It is currently completely web-based but doesn't need a web server but relies on an OC4J container. Finally I found the cause: the EMD_URL property in <server>/sysman/config/emd.properties didn't contain the port. After adding 5505 I was finally able to start the enterprise manager and to connect to it with a browser, but... immediately the whole thing crashed with some java error and I haven't had the time to figure out wat is wrong.

Besides the enterprise manager problems, the whole installation went quite smoothly and I seem to have a working database :-). I think I can solve these problems and will keep you informed.
Posted by Aino at 19:42