Installation guide

http://www.suse.com/oracle/ Page 7
Memory requirements: We recommend a total of at least 512 MB total RAM (physical RAM and
swap space). How much you actually need and how much of it should be physical RAM
completely depends on how you are going to use the database and how many users are going to
connect to it, and how your application works (does it do a lot of computing in the database, or
does it pull the data to another tier , e.g. an application server, and does the processing there?). The
extremes go from 128MB physical RAM for a slow demo database doing some swapping to a big
server system with several GB of RAM. Oracle provides sizing studies. This is an Oracle issue and
not really a Linux issue.
After the OS Installation
Remote access: After the OS installation the only way to access the system remotely is via Secure
Shell (ssh). Anything else, e.g. telnet, ftp, or rsh, will not work. For security reasons SuSE Linux
by default does not activate the inetd daemon providing those services, they have to be enabled
explicitly either by setting START_INETD in /etc/r.config to "yes" and (as root) calling "rcinetd
start" or by using the YaST2 Control Center (call "yast2" − works with and without X−Window −
go to "Network/Basic" and select option "Start/Stop services (inetd)" (which does the same thing).
See the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server documentation for details.
Special Partitioning: It is now time to setup the space for the Oracle installation. At least the
database files should be on different disks than the operating system, but the Oracle installation
should also go in a partition different from the operating system, see above, we recommend a clean
separation. Read the Oracle Administration Guide that comes with Oracle 8.1.7 about the Oracle
Flexible Architecture (OFA), the disk− and mount point setup Oracle recommends.
Since there are many different methods and all have their use, and depend a lot on how the
database is going to be used, we will not make any suggestions. A small demo/test system can very
well have everything, OS, Oracle and data files in one partition, but a big production database on a
server with many disks may have a very different setup.
Logical Volume Management and possibly also using raw I/O are more sophisticated methods
to manage space. These make sense for larger systems and databases. See the Logical Volume
Manager Whitepaper at http://www.suse.com/en/support/whitepapers/lvm/. Note that the PDF
version there may be slightly more up−to−date since the conversion to HTML is done separately.
Kernel parameters are something you do not need to worry about, we will set them dynamically
later during runtime. You can and should use the kernel the SuSE installer installed in your system,
unless you are really familiar with the process of compiling a new kernel. If you do compile your
own please use the SuSE kernel sources. Check if there is an official SuSE update kernel available
for SLES−7 on the Maintenance web.
If you use a 2.2 kernel and not a 2.4 one (the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 7 also features a 2.2.19
based kernel): In this case you may have to recompile the kernel to adjust the semaphore settings,
the shared memory ones do not need to be changed since we do this later during runtime. Install the
kernel sources, you will find the variables for the semaphore settings in
linux/include/linux/sem.h. Refer to either the Oracle Installation Guide for Linux for
which variables to set to what values, or simply read on, install the orarun8i.rpm package, and take
that information from the file /etc/rc.config.d/oracle.rc.config. For the installation
you do not need to do this in any case, only fro actually running Oracle.
Users and groups for Oracle (user oracle, groups oinstall, dba) are already there in SuSE Linux.
Environment variables are another subject we will take care of during the installation, by
installing a package SuSE created to make these things easier.