Creating a custom Oracle EBS preinstall RPM for RHEL7

1 min read

Feb 12, 2019 12:00:00 AM

Oracle, by default, ships preinstall RPMs only for Oracle Linux. Preinstall RPMs make the life of a DBA very easy by taking care of installing full laundry lists of required prereq RPMs for Oracle E-Business Suite, as well as setting all required kernel and limits parameters.

The Challenge: Oracle Preinstall RPMs and Red Hat Incompatibility

Even though Oracle Linux is derived from Red Hat Linux, we cannot install those preinstall RPMs on Red Hat Linux. Oracle-supplied preinstall RPMs have a prerequisite of using the UEK kernel. Since the UEK kernel is Oracle Linux-specific and Red Hat does not ship that kernel, the RPM will fail on Red Hat and won't set any required kernel parameters.

To solve this, I have created a new RPM for Red Hat that achieves the same result using the SRPMs from Oracle.

The Solution: A Custom Preinstall RPM for RHEL

You can download the RPM from the link below: https://github.com/vasuballa/oracle-rhel-preinstall/tree/master/RPMS/x86_64

Step-by-Step: Building Your Own RHEL Preinstall RPM

If you want to prepare the RPM yourself, here are the steps to follow:

$ wget https://oss.oracle.com/ol7/SRPMS-updates/oracle-ebs-server-R12-preinstall-1.0-3.el7.src.rpm  $ rpm2cpio oracle-ebs-server-R12-preinstall-1.0-3.el7.src.rpm | cpio -idmv  $ mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/  $ mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/  $ cp oracle-ebs-server-R12-preinstall-1.0.tar.gz ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/  $ cp oracle-ebs-server-R12-preinstall.spec ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/  $ vi ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/oracle-ebs-server-R12-preinstall.spec   # Within the editor, run these substitutions: :%s/kernel-uek/kernel/g  :%s/3.el7/3.rhel7/g   $ rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/oracle-ebs-server-R12-preinstall.spec  $ ls -ltr /home/oracle/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/oracle-ebs-server-R12-preinstall-1.0-3.rhel7.x86_64.rpm

Good luck installing Oracle on Red Hat Linux. Please let me know how these worked for you.