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Martin Klier

usn-it.de

Oracle 10gR2 Clusterware on Novell/SuSE SLES10 on multipath devices

Hi RAC-DBAs,

installing the Oracle Clusterware CRS 10.2 on SLES10 with its multipath devices can be tricky.

Background: The tool formatting the OCR disks, clsfmt.bin, is buggy concerning multipath / device mapper devices and you will see root.sh fail and clsfmt spit out errors like:

clsfmt: Failure trying to resize OCR file from ... bytes to ... bytes
clsfmt: Received unexpected error 4 from skgfifi

Oracle Patch Set 10.2.0.3 or one-off patch 4679769 from Oracle Metalink fixes this, but during install with runInstaller you are bound to the install kit 10.2.0.1 AND you cannot apply a patch before a product is fully installed. Subsequently, the root.sh fails and you have to clean up the mess manually and format the disks manually. I did not want do do so, I solved this problem in this way:

  1. downloaded Patch 4679769
  2. extracted it
  3. started runInstaller
  4. performed full configuration and install tasks until the point root.sh has to be executed. Left the message open.
  5. copied the clsfmt.bin from patch 4679769 directory to $ORA_CRS_HOME/bin on all nodes
  6. started root.sh (ran successfully)
  7. finished runInstaller as desired

Oracle Support approved this way on November 14th, 2007 in a service request.

Note: Please don’t forget to comment out the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL stuff in vipca and srvctl scripts on SLES10. Repeat this step after applying the 10.2.0.3 patchset.

Have always a good uptime, yours
Usn

My first steps with Gentoo – Part I
Another lecture “Basics of database technology” in German

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