Thursday, July 14, 2011

How To: Run a Silent Install with Response File

Many of you have done this many, many times.

Tonight was my first.

Environment:
HP-UX, 64bit, Itanium (oops).

I'm using cygwin to ssh into the server. Thanks to John Scott for helping me figure out how to run the GUI installer, well, pointing me in the right direction.

(At one point I asked The Twitter Machine for help, offering T-Shirts in trade for services rendered. Martin Berger, as usual, offered to help. Also, Fuad Arshad, TedC and others that I can't remember right now, I'm sorry).



I tried running xclock and got an error:
$ xclock
Error: Can't open display:
Ah, when I run the ssh command, I have to add a switch/flag thingy in there.
$ ssh -X oraclenerd@hpux
I found that solution here.

After restarting my session, I was able to successfully run xclock. OK, let's try it with the installer.

Wait a second...this line is too slow. 10 minutes for the GUI console to render. Don't ask about trying to do anything, like specify the directory or something silly like that.

I was back to the console method.

However, the first time I did it successfully, I got the Instant Client, which I didn't want.

How do I specify that which installation type I want while using the console? I was not prompted for anything.

Reading around...response file!

Read about response files here.

Like many things that intimidate me, I never bothered to look into it...but it was easy, too easy. That's about the point I kicked myself for being intimidated by that fancy DBA stuff.

So I grabbed the sample file out of response directory, edited it to suit my needs, and I was off and running again.
$ ./runInstaller -silent -responseFile /tmp/client/response/client_response.rsp
Starting Oracle Universal Installer...

Checking Temp space: must be greater than 415 MB. Actual 772 MB Passed
Checking swap space: must be greater than 150 MB. Actual 8192 MB Passed
Preparing to launch Oracle Universal Installer from /tmp/OraInstall2011-07-14_10-22-31PM. Please wait ...

$ You can find the log of this install session at:
/opt/oracle/oraInventory/logs/installActions2011-07-14_10-22-31PM.log
The following configuration scripts need to be executed as the "root" user.
#!/bin/sh
#Root scripts to run

/opt/oracle/product/11.2.0/client/root.sh
To execute the configuration scripts:
1. Open a terminal window
2. Log in as "root"
3. Run the scripts
4. Return to this window and hit "Enter" key to continue

Successfully Setup Software.

Or so I thought...now I need to run the root.sh as root? I'm not root, I'm not in the SUDOers file (or whatever it's called). It took 3 days for me to get the necessary privs to write to /opt/oracle

So now I have to wait for someone with those privs to complete the install.

But hey, I learned something new today.

4 comments:

Bradd Piontek said...

1. Silent install is the only way to go. you learn that working via VPNs at Pythian :) Also makes the installation very repeatable.
2. cygwin, really? I always found that a hassle just to have a window manager. Xming is open source and very lightweight. couple that with putty and you are set.
3. 11.2, even with silent installs, make sure $DISPLAY is not set, cause the silent install will still try and error out if it is.

oraclenerd said...

@bradd

1. I agree
2. I don't know any better. This is really the first time I have done it remotely sans Desktop environment. I'll have to take a look at Xming
3. Learned that too. unset DISPLAY was in my environment file. :)

Tom Kyle said...

I've found that sometimes ssh -X won't do the trick; you can try ssh -Y. I've encountered this when trying to run the Universal Installer remotely from a Mac.

rduke15 said...

I tried that, but still got the stupid java GUI. Maybe because I didn't unset $DISPLAY? And the messages were all in the wrong language too. It seems that Oracle use LC_CTYPE (!!??!!) to chose the language (instead of LC_MESSAGES or LANG or LANGUAGE).