Comments on: Corrupt download caused installation to hang, unzip lessons learned

By: Dan Norris

Dan Norris — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:32:30 +0000

Good tips. I am pretty sure I'll remember unzip -q before I'll remember
to check the exit code. Weird how I usually remember to check $? in a
script, but never do it interactively.

Thanks for the ideas!

By: markie_mark

markie_mark — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:52:21 +0000

Ah yeah - and a general good practice is to check the error code of the command you last ran (especially for important steps!).

$ echo $?

Will return the exit status of the last command - generally '0' implies a successful execution - consulting the man page for most commands will give a detailed description of the exit status meanings:

DIAGNOSTICS
The exit status (or error level) approximates the exit codes defined by PKWARE and takes on the following values, except under VMS:

0 normal; no errors or warnings detected.

1 one or more warning errors were encountered, but processing completed successfully anyway. This includes zipfiles where one or more files was skipped due to unsupported compression
method or encryption with an unknown password.

HTH

Mark

By: markie_mark

markie_mark — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:25:55 +0000

Another “gotya” of this nature is with tar files, especially with the non-GNU versions of tar, some of which have limitations with the length of basename and filename – resulting in tar spitting out files which are not usable – this is especially prevalent in older traditional unix systems (Solaris etc.). The problem is reported however because most people execute tar with the verbose flag that there is so much output you don't notice the errors – $ tar xfv mark.tar. If you drop the verbose flag – only errors and the tar summary are printed.

The resolution to opening tar files with long pathname is to install and use the GNU version of tar (often called gtar) and use it when manually creating and extracting tar files (Note: do not replace the system tar – it's used by pkginfo).

HTH

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:22:03 +0000

Useful tip. I've now started using the -q flag most of the time when I do an unzip. Thanks!

By: Dan Norris

Dan Norris — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:47:20 +0000

I hadn't checked the certification matrix on that, but I am rarely
seeing 3rd party clusterware being used these days (maybe it's just me),
so I haven't had a need to look it up. Thanks for the tip.

By: Miles Anderson

Miles Anderson — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:29:00 +0000

Dan,

Thanks for clearing up this issue with Clusterware and Oracle. Just so you know Oracle RAC with RHEL-5 OS is only certified with Oracle Clusterware.

Thanks,
Miles

By: Dan Norris

Dan Norris — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:56:14 +0000

It sure could have, but this .zip file had been successfully been used
previously on other computers, so it was presumed to be “good” and there
was no reason to go through the extra checking step at this point. The
issue must have been when the .zip was copied from the shared drive to
my local machine–somehow a corruption was introduced during that copy.
Good tip, though–it'll definitely be on my list for troubleshooting if
this happens again!

By: Brian Bent

Brian Bent — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:35:24 +0000

Dan,
Curious if a checksum of the zip file would have revealed a different number than what is listed on the OTN page. Yeah I know it is after the fact, but another tool at hand to help us with those files we download from the Internet.

Brian

By: Dan Norris

Dan Norris — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:40:13 +0000

Hi Miles,

No, I don't think so. Red Hat doesn't deliver any Oracle software with
any of its releases. Oracle Clusterware must be installed from the
Oracle Clusterware media (CD or .zip file or .cpio archives) after RHEL
is installed.

In any case, you will *always* have to install Oracle Clusterware--even
if you do use a supported 3rd-party clusterware (I don't think RH's
clusterware is supported or necessary for RAC unless it's required for
RH's cluster filesystem--not sure on the support status of that). So, if
you were using, for example, Veritas Cluster Server or Veritas Storage
Foundation for Oracle RAC, you'd install and configure that product and
then install Oracle Clusterware "on top" of it. Oracle Clusterware's
installation process will detect installed and supported 3rd party
clusterware and properly integrate with it as appropriate. If the 3rd
party clusterware is not supported, then Oracle Clusterware very likely
won't detect it which may lead to conflicts in the future if one
clusterware wants to evict a node and the other does not.

Hope that clears it up.

Dan

By: Miles Anderson

Miles Anderson — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:22:01 +0000

Dan,

Just wanted to ask you a few questions concerning RAC. Is the Clusterware that is delivered with Redhat V5 the same as Oracle Clusterware.
If I already have the Clusterware that comes with Redhat V5 do I still need to install the Oracle Clusterware for RAC?

Thanks,
Miles