Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 9676
Oracle8i will not work after 6.1 upgrade
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:54 EDT
I apologize for not having more information. I don't know what the source of the problem is. I'm sending this in so you can be aware of difficulties if someone else has the same problem. We received a Dell system with RedHat 6.0 installed by Dell. I upgraded the system to 6.1 using a RedHat 6.1 CD. The upgrade went well, but a subsequent Oracle8i install did not. We fought the problem for a couple of weeks, verifying that all of the components needed by Oracle were in place (including the proper JRE) and that the environment was set up right. The problem seemed to be with svrmgrl's ability to connect to the oracle process. We were running everything on the same machine, so a listener wasn't required. We installed one anyway, but that didn't help. The basic problem was that svrmgrl would not display a prompt. It would hang and could be killed only with kill -9. sqlplus had the same problem when it tried connecting with the oracle process. We tried uninstalling all the Oracle8i packages and reinstalling Oracle8i that didn't help. Finally, in desperation, we installed (rather than upgraded) RedHat 6.1. This partitioned the drives (we used the same number and sizes as before) and formatted them. We then installed almost all of the packages (leaving out the news server and one or two others). We set up the oracle user account, the environment, and the JRE as described in the Oracle8i instructions. (We used the JRE tar file we'd prevously downloaded from blackdown.org. So that hadn't changed.) The Oracle8i installation was then flawless. Absolutely no problems. As a final note, we did NOT, at any time, modify the kernel as suggested in the Oracle8i installation instructions. Our machine is a 550 MHz Pentium III with 256 MB of memory and about 20 GB of disk space, mostly empty. The swap partition is 512 MB as I remember. It was smaller before (200 MB, I think), but I doubt that's the problem. There are no users on the machine. It runs the DB only (but it's a workstation install--with the Gnome and KDE desktops). It's running with only Linux on board--no Win95/NT or other OS.
Passed on for verification in test lab.
Red Hat Linux 6.1 (as shipped) is not compatible with Oracle 8i. Please refer to the page below for more information. This is a problem with Oracle and not with you Red Hat installation. http://technet.oracle.com/tech/linux
I believe you have closed this report as "NOTABUG" because of an existing problem with Oracle8i on RedHat6.1. However, we COULD NOT apply the Oracle fix because it required svrmgrl to run. This patch was not relevant to the problem we were having. As stated in the bug report, svrmgrl WOULD NOT RUN until we installed 6.1 over the top of the upgrade from 6.0 to 6.1. After doing the 6.1 install, reinstalling the JRE, and reinstalling Oracle8i, svrmgrl WOULD run. THEN we applied the fix from Oracle without a problem. And then everything seemed to work fine. Agan: WE COULD NOT APPLY THE ORACLE PATCH UNTIL INSTALLING 6.1 to replace the previous upgrade. I still believe the problem was in the upgrade.
We are looking into the differences between the files that land on a system in an upgrade and the files which land on the system in a fresh install. Hopefully will have something pretty soon for you as an explanation.
One more thing that I hadn't mentioned is that I initially downloaded and installed the libc5 version of the JRE rather than the glibc version. When I discovered my error, I downloaded the correct version and installed it. With the libc5 version, the Oracle installer would not function. With the glibc version it would. I assumed that the new, glibc, installation corrected the problem. However, it is possible that some libc5 files were left laying around and could have caused some problems.
I'm closing this as we can't reproduce it, it doesn't seem to be affecting you anymore (after you reinstalled), and no other users have reported this. If you still need another workaround, pklplease reopen this bug.