I got the idea for the kernel bait-and-switch trick from Ingvar Hagelund. See: http://users.linpro.no/ingvar/rpm.html
This successful RAC 11g install on Ubuntu could not have been accomplished without the help of this webpage, and I emailed Ingvar and he helped step me through some problems I ran into embedding the Red Hat kernel in the Ubuntu system.

It depends on the definition of stable.
Anyway, any sensible DBA will *not* run Oracle RAC on Ubuntu in *production*. For test and development — maybe. On the other hand, why would one want to make your test and development environments to look different?

IMHO, it’s only usable for some personal tests and research. I personally installed it earlier this year only because Ubuntu consumed less resources so that I could run more virtual machine and have 3 nodes RAC demo.

Awesome comment. Actually up to now I was re-running the following command after rebooting :
/u01/app/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/bin/localconfig reset
I’ll set that up asap.

Regarding the MEMORY_TARGET parameter, actually it works fine on Ubuntu. The problem I guess comes from the fact it check the available memory before using it. The message says the feature is not available but actually, it will be… If you free your memory.

Thank you very much.

Procedure to Reliably spawn ocssd.bin during bootup:

I am running Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on vmware 1.0.3 on a Dell Latitude D820 Laptop. I run it with between 512-788Mb which is sufficent to support my linux and my ASM instance. Here are the steps which hopefully folks will try out to get a textbook startup of ASM CSS on Gutsy Gibbon so that I can get some feedback if this is working generally for folks. Also, this can probably be simplified and improved I would imagine. Here it is:

Step 1.
Go to /etc and edit the “inittab” file there and change the part
“h1:35:respawn…” to
“h1:23:respawn…”
This change is needed because active runlevels are 23 (the Debian/Ubuntu defaults) instead of 35 (the Red Hat and Suse defaults). For more information on this change, see these references:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Oracle10gBreezy
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.chinaunix.net%2Fu%2F7667%2Fshowart_146276.html&langpair=zh%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8

[ Note 1, I actually first got hip to this at the second link (from a China source) so I’d like to say thanks to “blue_stone” who says of himself at his website: “I blue_stone, a drift of the oracle engineers in Beijing”. Thanks, blue_stone.]

[Note 2: *A useful side note which I humbly suggest at this point, for people struggling with remedying the issues with Oracle on Ubuntu: Debian was the distribution of Linux from which Ubuntu originally was forked. When looking for solutions to Ubuntu problems, also google on “Debian” because many of the old Debian fixes for Oracle will work for Ubuntu also.]

[Note 3: There is also a copy of the inittab in the directory
$ ORACLE_HOME/css/admin/inittab_local where you *may* or *may not* want to make this change as well (changing “h1:35:respawn…” to “h1:23:respawn…”] but I think that the change has to be made here as well because I think that this may be used as a template when oracle creates /etc/inittab so it has to have the correction to “”23″ as well so that the templating will be correct if “localconfig reset” is ever used (which I *guess* overwrites /etc/inittab).

Step 2
When the Oracle installer runs on Ubuntu, it creates the symlinks in the /etc/rcX.d directories; however, it omits the symlink for init.cssd in rc2.d (again, the runlevels issue due to Debian/Ubuntu vs. RedHat/Suse runlevels). Since the default runlevel for Ubuntu is level 2, we need that symlink in /etc/rc2.d. Create it as follows:

ln -s /etc/init.d/init.cssd /etc/rc2.d/S96init.cssd

[note, you should also create the following link at this time if it does not exist already:

ln -s /etc/init.d/init.cssd /etc/rc2.d/K96init.cssd

so that css will exit cleanly at reboot or shutdown time].

This information about this was also found at the link:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Oracle10gBreezy
Note however, that when I attempted to implement the changes described there, I found that this command did not work as described:

update-rc.d init.cssd defaults 96

Basically when I did what was described there, (i.e. the “rm” commands for the symlinks in /etc/rc[2,3,5].d worked great, but the update-rc.d didn’t create anything to replace them. However, I believe that only the link described above in /etc/rc2.d is needed. But my advice would be to skip the rm’s that are described at that reference, and just create the needed link in /etc/rc2.d as described above.

[ Note: You can also get a listing of what Oracle puts out in the /etc/rcX.d directories by default when installing from this link:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sql.ru%2Fforum%2Factualthread.aspx&langpair=ru%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8

it looks to me like Oracle does install the / etc/rc3.d/S01init.cssd -> .. /init.d/init.cssd link and that it only forgets the startup link described above.]

Step 3
As noted in the original article Gregory pointed out that Ubuntu by default in Gutsy Gibbon does not use inittab anymore. This has been replaced by something called “Upstart” which is described at the following webpage as “…an event-based replacement for the /sbin/init daemon which handles starting of tasks and services during boot…”.

Now my install of Ubuntu 7.10 apparently ended up with upstart configured and running when I installed Ubuntu. I installed my Ubuntu according to the other Pythian article “Installing Oracle 11g on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) November 6th, 2007 - by Augusto Bott” so I’m guessing if you follow Augusto’s article for your Oracle install and then move on to Gregory’s article for your ASM configuration on Gutsy, you will probably have “Upstart” running as well and so should not have to take any action to make use of it.

You can test to see if Upstart is running ok by creating this file /etc/event.d/event.d.echo and then rebooting your Ubuntu:

#—————————————
# this is a test of upstart

description “Upstart Echo”

start on startup
exec echo “Special Startups for Oracle/ASM/Cluster Support…”
console output

#———————————-

Then reboot your Ubuntu 7.10 and see if you see that echo’d message appear during startup. If it appears, and if you created the “event.d.echo” file correctly, that phase will jump out at you during bootup.

If upstart is working, then we can move on to the final piece of this method to “startup ASM cleanly on Gutsy” procedure. If it isn’t then go to this link to find out how to get upstart installed and configured:

http://upstart.ubuntu.com/getting-started.html

Once upstart is working, we put in the last piece of the puzzle. Create a file /etc/event.d/event.d.cssd and put this in the file:

#————————————-
# This service maintains the CSS Daemon for ASM
# from the point the system is started until it is shutdown.

description “CSS Daemon”

start on startup
stop on shutdown

script
sleep 45
nohup /etc/init.d/init.cssd run >/dev/null 2>&1 </dev/null &
end script

#————————————————-

[ Note1: I don’t know if the sleep 45 is needed or not or if the timing matters. I haven’t had a chance to play around with the setup to see how changes affect the startup of ocssd.bin at boot time. This setup is working perfectly for me as is. ]

[ Note2: You’ll notice this command comes right out of Gregory’s procedure here for starting ASM from Gregory’s “Question #3″ (see original article) which is where I got this command from to plug in to this upstart script ]

[ Note3: General note about init.cssd vs. ocssd.bin from Metalink: In a normal environment, init spawns init.cssd, which in turn spawns OCSSD as a child. Also, it’s worth noting the following additional info from Metalink: In a non-RAC environment, the ocssd.bin process is used for communication between a database instance and the ASM (Automatic Storage Management) instance. Even if you are not using ASM this process will be run out of the inittab. These two nuggets of background info come from Metalink docs 311647.1 and one other doc which I can’t recall at the moment, but it’s just general background info which helped me understand the difference between init.cssd and ocssd.bin ]

So now, if your Gutsy setup digests these changes the same way mine did, you end up with a Gutsy that will reliably spawn ocssd.bin first time every time at bootup. I rebooted 5 or 6 times to test to be sure it was working always, and it was. I hope I didn’t leave out any steps. The script in event.d.cssd is needed.

Also, I’d like to say hi to Babette Turner-Underwood who I met while attending AUSOUG 2007 at Perth and Melbourne, at which conference we both had the honor of giving presentations. I’d also like to say that Pythian just keeps coming up with one hit after another pushing the envelope of what is possible with Oracle!! I am so grateful to you that words cannot express for this really superb work you have done showing how to use Ubuntu Gutsy with Oracle!! THANKS!

PS I’ve got some more goodies I’ve worked out with a starting point from Gregory’s article so if anyone finds this post useful, let me know and I’ll cough up some more discoveries of ASM on Ubuntu, including how to automate setup of your raw devices and how to use dbca to create your ASM instance, and in particular how to fix the problem which pops up during dbca creation of ASM regarding “MEMORY_TARGET” error ORA-00845 MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system. There is a fix for that as well!

Gil Standen
mail@consultingcommandos.com