Oracle on Linux
15 July 2002 11:00

15 Jul, 2002. Today I installed Oracle 9.2.0 on a fairly stock RedHat Linux 7.2 machine. The main gotcha I ran into was setting the shmmax kernel parameter. It used to be that you had to rebuild your kernel to set that one, so I shied away from doing it, even though the docs said I needed to. But then I found that it was apparently as easy as echoing the value in to /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax. Oracle recommends setting it to half the amount of physical memory (Perhaps that became a /proc entry in 2.4.x???).

I was able to get through the install fine without making the change, but once I tried creating a database it was a no-go. I tried lowering the memory size of the db I was creating, as well as dropping the number of processes, as suggested in a metalink document, all of which had no effect. The database creation kept bailing out with an ORA-03113, until I made the change in /proc. Guess they mean it when they say you need to change it ;-)

Now, I haven't used this stuff in a production environment yet, but I can at least get the database started and perform exports/imports against it. YMMV.