November 19, 2004: db 10g installation on linux suse 9.2

Installation of Suse 9.2 on my Dell Latitude laptop went flawless :-).
Then it was time for the database...
The pre-installation guidelines are clear and ensured a smooth installation, but a few issues remain. At first the main important issue is that Suse 9.2 professional is not an official supported platform. The check at the beginning of the installation procedure is easily bypassed with the line 'redhat-3' in the file '/etc/redhat-release'. So far so good. The installation of the enterprise-edition went smooth.
The first problems occurred during database creation. Thet were a bit cryptic (and I cannot remember them anymore) and creation of the database seemed fine. The database was up and running and usable :-). Later on I experienced some more problems that I discovered were related to these errors. They were caused by a password that contained a - (dash). My advise is to avoid special characters in your database password (maybe that's a known issue for the DBA).
The other more problematic problems occurred with the enterprise manager. It runs as a j2ee application (the dbconsole) and is accessable via the browser. I could start the console (emctl start dbconsole) but it died after a short while. After a lot of trial and error and searching the internet I discovered that it had three causes (actually two). The users sysman and dbsnmp were locked out and their (identical) password contained a dash. Entries in /etc/services interfered with the configuration of the enterprise manager. Most comments on the internet say to comment out port 1830, but neglect to mention port 5500-5505. The latter finally fixed my problems. It was much harder to find because the logs mention that it cannot find some classes so you start looking in the wrong directions: [Orion Launcher] ERROR app.ContextInitializer contextInitialized.256 - Integration Class not found:.

To summarize:
10g installs and runs fine on Suse 9.2 but it requires some tweaks:


  1. Suse 9.2 professional is not an official supported platform. Easily fixed by the redhat-release file.

  2. Make absolutely sure that the db users sysman and dbsnmp are unlocked

  3. Don't use special characters in the passwords

  4. Uncomment the ports 1830 and 5000-5005 in /etc/services

Some advise: Do not try to fix the oem configuration. Remove it with emca -x and recreate a new one with dbca.

I am thankful to the following references:
BuggyBean
Linux installfest document
The Oracle installation guide
Many discussions on OTN and other forums.

Posted by Aino at 20:43