How sweet it is..

Prejudice, one of the worst things in real life, and of course the same applies to the IT world.

So after a lot of years in which I almost exclusively worked with RedHat I'm back at SuSe, SLES9 to be specific.

Ok, installing Oracle is something I do every day but when I found out that there is no such thing as /etc/sysctl.conf in SuSe I thought "Yes, this is the reason for not using this flavour." .

But then I found the orarun.rpm (http://ftp.novell.com/partners/oracle/sles-9/); installed it, ran it - and voila: everything was set.

So today's lesson will be: Just the facts - prejudice will trouble your mind.

Setting up SLES 9 in VMWare

I had encountered this problem earlier and as so often didn't took notes. Serves me right when the same problem showed up again. Now I try to use this blog as a kind of virtual notebook. Wonder how many of you do this as well?

When you want to setup SLES in a VMWare environment you might end up with a four-way split screen of the installation process. As you can imagine this does not offer a very readable output.

In order to get rid of this just set the following setting during the installation.

When prompted for the installation or boot method select "Manual" and type

x11i=fbdev

in the boot options text area at the lower end of the screen.
Problem solved - and on to new adventures with SLES :-)

When basic operations fail

I wonder how often this happens to other people?

You use a certain command every other day, then forget it for a while and then - when using it again those commands play dirty tricks on you. Kind of a revenge for a lack of TLC?

Happened to me today. I was playing with my VMWare machines and was tired of starting all Oracle components by hand. Of course the only viable solution is a script.

So writing one was done in about a minute.

Here it is:

export ORAENV_ASK=no
export ORACLE_SID=soadb
. oraenv
lsnrctl start
sqlplus <<>
connect / as sysdba
startup
EOF
emctl start dbconsole
export ORACLE_SID=soasuite
. oraenv
opmnctl startall


Starting my script and turning away to read some other blogs I returned after five minutes hoping that everything was up and running.
No. My script waited with

ORACLE_SID = [soadb] ?


Took me another five minutes to find the solution.
Apparently ORAENV_ASK will work perfectly with a capital NO but not with a lowercase no.

So I invite you all to tell me how stupid I was and how often these little annoying things happen to you.