Geeky Project Part 4: Create a WebCenter VM

While finishing yesterday’s Part 3, I decided to investigate how to add a swap file to my OEL 5 VM to accomodate at least one of 11g’s resource requirements.

I may eventually have to bump up the physical memory allocated to the VM, which will completely cripple the host OS, but I’m bending the rules here a bit, i.e. I’m building a server VM on a client box with only 2 GB of RAM.

Not exactly the intended configuration for big iron software like 11g.

So, anyway, I did some digging and found a how-to for adding swap. Seems pretty easy.

To add a swap file:

Determine the size of the new swap file and multiple by 1024 to determine the block size. For example, the block size of a 64 MB swap file is 65536.

At a shell prompt as root, type the following command with count being equal to the desired block size:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=65536

Setup the swap file with the command:

mkswap /swapfile

To enable the swap file immediately but not automatically at boot time:

swapon /swapfile

To enable it at boot time, edit /etc/fstab to include:

/swapfile   swap   swap   defaults   0 0

The next time the system boots, it will enable the new swap file.

Figured it would work for OEL too, which this post confirmed.

I used this installation note to determine how much swap I wanted to add, figuring about 1.5 GB should do the trick.

Ready to go, I waded in, but hit a snag on the second step.

bash: mkswap: command not found

Hmm. Seems odd, since I was using root. Back to Google.

Turns out to be an easy fix, one which I’m sure you already know. The command mkswap isn’t in the path of the user oracle, so I either had to a) login to OEL as root or b) use the full path for the command, /sbin/mkswap.

I chose the former and everything went well.

As an aside, I know this is n00b stuff, but bear with me here. The goal of this exercise is not only to produce a WebCenter VM, but also to document what it’s taken me to do that, including all the little steps. I’m hoping this will help others wade through the process, even the stuff that might be obvious.

Linux is a dark art. I’m a white belt.

Moving on, the final test for my 11g install was to open sqlplus, which seems a bit academic since I didn’t install the demo database. Still, I suppose it’s worth a go.

Again, using this guide, I followed the steps in the Appendix to set the Oracle environment variables and fire up sqlplus. The moment of truth came and I got this error ending in a nice “Permission denied” message. Ugh.

I thought I had disabled SELinux when I installed OEL. Guess not. A star popped up in the upper right-hand corner of the top panel, providing some detail about why I wasn’t permitted to run sqlplus.

Easy fix. I decided to disable SELinux, since I won’t need it, despite the ominous warning.

After a quick restart, I was able to get sqlplus going. A bit moot, considering I didn’t install the demo database, but it’s a milestone anyway. Fingers crossed that everything is cool.

So, now I’m ready for WebLogic. I’ve actually finished that process, but rather than create a giant post that mixes in a couple logical steps, I’ll save the details of that install for another post.

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