Tuesday 27 January 2015

Using Hyphen In OS Username Or ORACLE_HOME Path in Oracle 12c Database Installation Will Make You Cry

Recently I was involved in an upgrade project on Linux platforms to Oracle 12c (12.1.0.2) and the customer wanted to name the owners of the Oracle SW distribution according to their company standard. So instead of using "grid"  and "oracle" OS account names they wanted to have the names which would start with "svc-" and continue with unique non Oracle standard name for either grid infrastructure or database software. Besides using this names as owners of grid and database software we used them also in the names of the GRID_HOME and ORACLE_HOME directories according to Oracle OFA suggestion.

So no problems with those names during installation and database creation. However, when  we wanted to patch the grid infrastructure and Oracle home with latest patches, the Opatch utility returned with an error that it can't parse the path to Oracle grid infrastructure. I immediately recognized the problem and the only remedy was to uninstall both grid and database SW. And then bang, another surprise, the Oracle 12c deinstallation procedures crashed as well. This time the reason was in checking the ownership of the distribution (grid or oracle).

The regular expression used to find the owner of the distribution in the script is /.*?\((\w+)\).*/
String returned by "id" command is:

uid=211(svc-xxxyyy) gid=201(oinstall) groups=201(oinstall), 200(dba), 205(asmadmin), 206(asmdba), 207(asmoper), 110000513(domain users) 

The $1 returned variable gets value "oinstall" instead of svc-xxxyyy and this causes deinstalltion script to fail.  The right expression would be /.*?\((\w+\-\w+)\).*/


So how one can manually deinstall database home and grid infrastructure home? For ORACLE_HOME deinstallation one can follow Doc.ID 1624580.1 and run:

cd $ORACLE_HOME/oui/bin
./runInstaller -silent -detachHome ORACLE_HOME="/u01/app/svc-xxxyyy/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1" ORACLE_HOME_NAME="OraDB12Home1"


This operation succeeded without any problems. Deinstalling GRID_HOME was slightly more complicated and actually at the moment of writing this post there is no document on MOS relevant for manual deinstallation of grid infrastructure with configured Oracle Restart. The suggestion from Oracle support was to follow "How to Deinstall Oracle Clusterware Home Manually ( Doc ID 1364419.1 )" which was relevant for 11gR2 but not 12c. Actually I have performed the deinstalltion in two steps:

# roothas.sh -deconfig -force
$ runInstaller -detachHome -silent -local ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_HOME


The $ORACLE_HOME in this case was actually pointing to GRID_HOME.

Why I said in the title that this will make you cry - because you have to start it all over again and the Oracle Installer doesn't warn you about the problematic hyphen  during the installation process when all prerequisites are run.

So after being working so many years with Oracle products I was really angry with myself that I was caught on such stupid mistake.


2 comments:

  1. This must be the company I work for as I am currently going through hell with our security services group since they created a user account the is prefixed with "SVC-" and of course Oracle on a sharded DB config chokes with "ORA-00922: missing or invalid option" when trying to change the password, and I can't get the ALTER USER option to work either!

    Anyhow, I am going to have a meeting with that group concerning our account naming "policy" when it comes to DB Accounts.

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