Comments on: How To Set Up Oracle ASM on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

By: Anil

Anil — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:02:13 +0000

This is pretty cool and worked on Ubuntu 10.10. However, for Question #3, to startup CSS, when I ran localconfig add/reset, it failed since rc.* directories didn’t exist in /etc. I created all 7 of them /etc/rc.d/rc.[0-6] and ran localconfig and it created local OCR and installed init.cssd. Then I manually restarted CSS using the command given in Question #3. Thanks for your post!

By: How can I install Oracle ASM on Ubuntu Linux?

How can I install Oracle ASM on Ubuntu Linux? — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 20:27:49 +0000

[...] http://www.pythian.com/news/810/howto-set-up-oracle-asm-on-ubuntu-gutsy-gibbon/ May 27, 2010 11:36 am David Waters This question may be better suited for http://serverfault.com/ which is a site dedicated to systems administration May 27, 2010 12:48 pm Gary Generally Oracle supports their software on Red Hat (and it’s clones). May 27, 2010 11:36 am [...]

By: oldbarrel

oldbarrel — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:23:53 +0000

Greg/Gil,
you guys are amazing.

By: Gilbert Standen

Gilbert Standen — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:07:22 +0000

I may have to retract the comment about the time synch on Ubuntu – it seems to be ok now. The nodes have been up several hours and they are within about 1 second of each other – within the time it takes to actually check them. But I’d still like to learn more inter-node RAC clock synch tips and tricks since clocking has been one of the nagging problems I’ve run into with RAC installs and deployments.

By: Gilbert Standen

Gilbert Standen — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:40:51 +0000

The main trick (although there is of course alot more to it than this) is to install Ubuntu 7.10, then go over to a CentOS 5 (or similar Red Hat) and create a cpio archive of the CentOS/RedHat kernel, then install that kernel on the Ubuntu system and then run the Ubuntu under the CentOS/RedHat kernel – this will cause all kinds of key markers (such as /proc/version) to display CentOS/RedHat markers/versions, which goes a long long way to make the Oracle Installer feel more “comfortable” with your Ubuntu distro – effectively allows Ubuntu to “masquerade” as RedHat. Then you do the install (you have to manually install some packages – which involves converting them from RPM to .deb packages with alien) and once you have all the packages it wants, you get an “almost” clean “pre-install” (and also runcluvfy.sh will now work -with one little tweak to a configurationfile). The install then runs very cleanly. Once the install is done, you take away the RedHat kernel, and go back to booting the 2.6.22-14 Ubuntu kernel. It’s not quite that easy because you have to put some rawdevice startups in /etc/event.d and (in the rudimentary configuration I am running) you have to run some things from rc.local – I’m looking to improve and make this more elegant. But the sum total is that at the end of it all it appears to be a stable system. crsctl check crs comes back clean, ASM comes up normally, etc. I’m letting it run for a few days to see if it still has any problems. One problem that Ubuntu seems to have (at least in vm) is that the linux clocking isn’t as compatible with the host as is CentOS (which keeps very good inter-node time synch) wheras the ubuntu node clocks drift apart quite quickly – even with all the tweaks and even with ntp running. I haven’t found a good fix for this yet. I think this clock problem can eventually bring the RAC nodes down but I’m not sure how tolerant the RAC is of widely out-of-synch linux system clocks.

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.

By: GrÃ©gory

GrÃ©gory — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 03:12:02 +0000

Kudos! I’m impressed and I’m looking forward to learning how you’ve done that.

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 02:02:57 +0000

Can a stable 11g RAC cluster be run on Ubuntu 7.10? Yes, it can!

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.

By: Gilbert Standen

Gilbert Standen — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 01:10:31 +0000

Ok sportsfans, I think we have a first. I’m pleased to announce I’ve got a running Oracle 11g 11.1.0.6.0 2-node RAC cluster running on Ubuntu 7.10 Linux. Installed 100% clean, runs beautifully. Remember, you heard it first here! My starting point was the work by Augusto Bott and Gregory Guillou and then I just kept at it until the secret was found. Can a stable 11g RAC cluster be run on Ubuntu 7.10? Yes, it can!

By: How to Rename a Copied or Cloned ASM Disk Group

How to Rename a Copied or Cloned ASM Disk Group — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 04:52:54 +0000

[...] tested the whole process with Oracle 11.1.0.6 on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, based on a previous post I made on this blog. In order to copy the ASM disks, I’ve used the dd command, but it should not make any [...]

By: Gilbert Standen

Gilbert Standen — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:06:31 +0000

Gregory, thank YOU very much. Without your great article I’d have been completely lost!