Installing the latest incarnation of Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 as a paravirtualized machine in Oracle VM Server is a bit tricky.
The OEL5 is delivered as 5 iso files, cd images they are. The Oracle VM Manager is only able to install the patched paravirtualized guest system from one installation medium. Damn it, they praise their system as blazing fast under their own VM and didn’t manage to deliver the stuff as one dvd image?
After a lot of googling i found the following script. Its a CentOS script to combine their installation mediums into on, big iso file. I thought, give it a try as CentOS is based on RedHat as well is OEL5. It ate a lot of diskspace but in the end, i got a working DVD that i mounted via the loop device.
mount -o rw,loop /OVS/tmp/oel5dvd.iso /tmp/oel5/ |
The next step requires the installation medium available either via http, ftp or nfs. Starting nfsd and exporting the fs is done easily via:
/etc /init.d/nfs start exportfs *:/tmp/oel5/ |
I had all the iso and the resulting dvd on my Oracle VM Server. The default installation is rather strict with the iptable rules.
Although Oracle VM Manager will except an nfs://127.0.0.1/… path and also do the initial patching, the installation will fail afterwards.
To get NFS working, i followed these instructions to pin all needed ports and open them in iptables.
Installation itself was after that straigt forward. I deselected all prepackaged environments since the server was destined to be a database server.
I didn’t realize that this was going to be a problem.
There is no centralized repository in the RHEL or OEL world like the one in Debian or Ubuntu. Either hunt the rpms down or subscribe to the services both manufactures offers, in my case the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network. Hello? I just wanted to install a gcc, for example.
Their is no possibility in the gui to reuse your installation medium as a repository for “YUM” or “Pirut”.
Bummer! After a lot of searching i found this, but this method didn’t work for me. Nevertheless, i’ve learnd how to configure repositories for yum. Pirut did find the installation medium but wasn’t able to install a package due to an “uropen error unknown url type: media”.
My solution was to copy all rpms from the /Server directories of the original installation disk along with “comps-rhel5-server-core.xml” from the first disc found in /Server/repodata/ to disk, running
createrepo -g comps-rhel5-server-core.xml . |
and finally exporting this directory as a nfs share, configuring it to yum with the following:
[oel5] name=Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 baseurl=file:///tmp/oel5_repository enabled=1 gpgcheck=0 |
After a “yum clean all”, pirut can add and remove packages from the “original” medium without any hassle.
I installed the following packages:
yum install binutils yum install compat-libstdc++ yum install elfutils-libelf yum install elfutils-libelf-devel yum install gcc yum install gcc-c++ yum install glibc yum install glibc-common yum install glibc-devel yum install glibc-headers yum install libaio yum install libaio-devel yum install libgcc yum install libstdc++ yum install libstdc++-devel yum install make yum install sysstat yum install unixODBC yum install unixODBC-devel |
preparing the next post which is about installing Oracle 11g on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.
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