Installing Oracle on Red Hat

This blog is about Installing Oracle 10g on Red Hat 5. I am assuming that you have some experience in using Red Hat.

When installing Red Hat 5.5 on my machine, I had selected the text install of Linux (it was the requirement of the time). So when we actually installed Oracle, we will had to use the X Emulation. I'll explain using that later, when we actually come to it.When you install Red Hat 5, do select the software development packages as they are required for Oracle installation to be successful.Without them you will get error at the beginning of the Oracle Installation itself.

Also, for Oracle to run on Red Hat, Red Hat must be compiled with a proper kernel. My default kernel didn't work, so I choose kernel 2.6.19.5. In case you choose not to, and if the Oracle is not the right one, Oracle may install correctly, but it may give errors later on. To download the kernel and compile it, give the following commands.

• cd /usr/src
• wget -c http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.19.5.tar.bz2
• tar xvfj linux-2.6.19.5.tar.bz2
• cd linux-2.6.19.5
• make menuconfig

After the make menuconfig command, you will see a menu, as seen below;

 From the menu, select Block Layer. You will see "Enable the Block Layer" menu as seen below:

From the above menu, I had selected all options. Exit from this menu, and then exit from the makeconfig menu. You will come back to the bash prompt. Give the following commands:

• make
• make modules
• make modules_install
• make install
• mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.19.5.img 2.6.19.5

 The last command may give an error to some, I got one too, and I ignored it, and nothing woring has happened as such.Next, we need to create some users. Use the following commands:

• groupadd dba

• groupadd oinstall

• useradd -G dba -d /home/oracle -g oinstall oracle

• passwd oracle

Next, we need to add kernel parameters which are required for Oracle to work properly. With root credentials, open the /etc/sysctl.conf file, and append the following line in it:

kernel.shmmni = 4096

kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128

net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000

net.core.rmem_default=262144

net.core.rmem_max=262144

net.core.wmem_default=262144

net.core.wmem_max=262144 

Give the following commands for these settings to come in effect:

• sysctl -w
• sysctl -p

Next, open the /etc/security/limits.conf file and apend the following lines to increase the System File Descriptor:

*               soft    nproc   2047
*               hard    nproc   16384
*               soft    nofile  8192
*               hard    nofile  65536
 

Once all this is done, reboot the machine with the new compiled kernel

After rebooting, log in with user Oracle and download the right Oracle installer file, which in my case was in "cpio" format. Use the following command to extract the cpio file into a folder:

• cat filename.cpio|cpio -idmv

This will create a database folder, and everything will be extracted into it.Next, get into the folder, and run the following:

• ./runInstaller -IgnoreSysPreReqs

This will start the Oracle installer, I did next and next for everything, took all the default options, and in around an hour I had oracle installed.