When starting the install of Oracle Database Server there always seems to be a few items that either you are just suppose to know or you spend a day banging your head against the wall trying to figure out what you need to do to get the install up and running.

First item, is creating a database user and group for the install. Do this as the root user:

# groupadd -g 1001 oinstall
# groupadd -g 1002 dba
# useradd -u 1002 -g oinstall -G dba oracle
# passwd oracle

Next, you need to setup X11 forwarding. Modify the /etc/ssh/ssh_config file to allow forwarding: ForwardX11 yes. I personally use BitVise SSH Client and Xming in order to access my SSH environments. In the Xming client, I change the offset to 10 from the default of 0. In the SSH Client, enable X11 Forwarding and set it to 127.0.0.1:10. On the Unix box, install the xauth rpm using yum install xauth. Connect as the oracle user (or psoft) and create the xauthority file, command: xauth add 127.0.0.1:10 . 12345678900987654321123456789009 – you should be able to validate that x11 works by running xclock – if you see a clock, you are golden! If you see the error: Warning: Cannot convert string “” to type XftFont, do a yum install xorg-x11-fonts*

Firewalls can be a bit of a problem, and you will want to make sure that the iptables firewall allows the database to talk to machines that will be connecting to the database. In this example 10.100.120.10 is my application server connecting to the database server 10.100.120.20:

-A INPUT -s 10.100.120.10 -p tcp -m state –state NEW,ESTABLISHED -m tcp –dport 1521 -j ACCEPT
-A OUTPUT -s 10.100.120.20 -p tcp -m state –state ESTABLISHED -m tcp –dport 1024:65535 –sport 1521 -j ACCEPT

RPMs need to installed in order to make the install work correctly, you can manually do everything or you can automate the application by:

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d
# wget https://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-ol6.repo –no-check-certificate
# yum install oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall
wget https://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 -O /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle –no-check-certificate

RPM Libraries need to be installed in order to make the OUI work:
binutils-2.17.50.0.6
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3 (32 bit)
elfutils-libelf-0.125
elfutils-libelf-devel-0.125
gcc-4.1.2
gcc-c++-4.1.2
glibc-2.5-24
glibc-2.5-24 (32 bit)
glibc-common-2.5
glibc-devel-2.5
glibc-devel-2.5 (32 bit)
glibc-headers-2.5
ksh-20060214
libaio-0.3.106
libaio-0.3.106 (32 bit)
libaio-devel-0.3.106
libaio-devel-0.3.106 (32 bit)
libgcc-4.1.2
libgcc-4.1.2 (32 bit)
libstdc++-4.1.2
libstdc++-4.1.2 (32 bit)
libstdc++-devel 4.1.2
make-3.81
sysstat-7.0.2

In order to allow remote logins into an Oracle database, you need to configure the database to use remote access, to do this you need to modify the init{sid}.ora file to have:

REMOTE_LOGIN_PASSWORDFILE = EXCLUSIVE

To create the password file, change to the ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory and run the orapwd program to create the remote access password file:

orapwd file=$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/orapw{sid} password={somepassword} entries=5

Sometimes I find myself on a unix based system for the first time in awhile and I have to use the tar program to extract data from a tar or tar.gz compressed data set.

Here is a nifty set of helpful tips:

You can also extract files that match a specific pattern. This example shows how to extract files that start with psoft from the tar file psoft.tar regardless of its directory location:

$ tar -xf psoft.tar --wildcards --no-anchored 'psoft*'

To extract all xml files:

$ tar -xf psoft.tar --wildcards --no-anchored '*.xml'

Command Flags:

• -x: instructs tar to extract files.
• -f: specifies filename / tarball name.
• -v: Verbose (show progress while extracting files).
• -j : filter archive through bzip2, use to decompress .bz2 files.
• -z: filter archive through gzip, use to decompress .gz files.
• –wildcards: instructs tar to treat command line arguments as globbing patterns.
• –no-anchored: informs it that the patterns apply to member names after any / delimiter.

This post was sourced from article: Tar Extract a Single File(s) From a Large Tarball from CyberCiti

Here is a link to a good overview of the:

PeopleSoft Search Framework Architecture

Well, I have just had my first full exposure to the glory they call Oracle Secure Enterprise Search!  All I can say is damn, that was NOT easy.

The documentation is pretty good that I found, and maybe it is easier on a fresh install but I was doing the setup on an existing environment that I had just upgraded.  The upgrade was for Finance from 8.9 to 9.2.  In the 9.2 application VERITY is no long supported, and the PeopleSoft Search Framework only supports Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (O-SES).  The first trick is to download it from edelivery and in my case I installed the software on my batch processing server.  This install will install a full Oracle database with a webservice that by default runs on port 7777.  There is a bunch of setup that needs to be done to get this working, but the documentation I had for the install was very good for this part.

Some of the next parts I thought were a little difficult to follow, and so the first item is, I used my system start user as my main user, and made sure it had the following roles:

Search Administrator, Search Developer, Search Query Administrator, Search Server

I also have a custom permission list that this user has access to and I made sure that the permission was assigned the search group: PTPORTALREGISTRY.  This appears to be a new security element in the permission lists.

The new Search Framework uses a ton of IB service operations to do all of its work, and one element you need to do is set the Portal Content & Portal URI text fields on the Node for all the local nodes, otherwise the search results will return incorrect content reference paths (extra:  don’t forget the “/” at the end of the URI).

Now, I also inactivated all my integration broker routings for the default local node after the upgrade so no IB would unnecessarily be taking place.  This might have been a bad idea, but old habits are hard to break.  Since O-SES uses the IB for its Search Framework, the following Service Operations need to be active with the routing turned on!

Service: PT_SES – Service Operation: PT_SES_CREF_GET, PT_SES_USERSEC_GET, PT_SES_INIT,

Service: PTSF_META_DATA: Service Operation: PTSF_GET_GROUP_CAT_LBLS, PTSF_GET_SRCH_CAT_DET, PSFT_GET_SRCH_GROUPS

Service: PTSF_SECURITY: Service Operation: PTSF_AUTHENTICATEUSER, PTSF_GETSECATTRVALUES, PTSF_GETUSERROLES, PTSF_POSTPROCESS_FILTER, PTSF_VALIDATESRCHUSER, PTSF_VALIDATEUSERROLE,

Service: PTSF_SES_FEED – Service Operation: PTSF_CRAWLER_CFG, PTSF_SES_CRAWLSTATUS, PTSF_SES_GET_CONTROL_FEED, PTSF_SES_PROCESS_ERRS, PTSF_SES_SCHEDULED_FEED

Service: ADMINSERVICE:  Service Operation: CREATE, CREATEALL, DELETE, DELETEALL, EXPORT, EXPORTALL, GETAPIVERSION, GETSTATE, START, UPDATE, UPDATEALL

Service: PTFP_FEED – Service Operation: PTFP_GETPREPUBFEED  (not 100% sure on this one, but I turned it on along the way).

Make sure you add the PTPORTALREGISTRY to the Home Page Context Type, I added mine and made it default.  I also found that I was getting no returns and then after a day of thinking about things I tried again and everything appeared to be working fine.  I believe that the system was bounced web and app during that time, so if all else fails that might work!

Good Luck!