Somewhat scolded into action by the ever-so-slightly shrill demands of a well-meaning correspondent, I have given Gladstone a little love and attention. It now supports doing 64-bit Oracle 11g installs onto Fedora 17 (provided you’re sticking to a default OS install… I haven’t a clue if it works with a KDE desktop and don’t intend finding out).
There are known issues, as follows:
- There is a lengthy pause whilst we install redhat-lsb in order to be able to correctly identify the particular flavour of Fedora in use. If you have a slow Internet connection, the script can sit there for a minute or two appearing to do nothing. Trust it and be patient!
- You will be told that settings for two kernel parameters (shmmni and shmall) can’t be determined and that the public domain korn shell is not installed. You can safely click ‘Ignore All’, since none of these warnings are of any significance whatever. (The relevant parameters will have been set correctly, and pdksh hasn’t really been required for years) .
- At the 70% installed stage, you’ll get an error message about a failure to link the EM Agents makefile properly. At this point, switch away from the Oracle installer and go find a file called fedora-linking-error-fix.sh sitting in the Desktop directory in the oracle user’s home. Run the script with the command: ./fedora-linking-error-fix.sh and then you can click the ‘Retry’ button back in the Oracle installer. Everything will then proceed without issue.
- A feature of Gnome 3 is that the Desktop directory is a bit redundant (you can’t see its contents on the visible ‘desktop’, in other words). Worse, if you create a new user, a Desktop directory isn’t created for them by default in their home directory. Gladstone now, therefore, tests for the existence of this directory and creates it if it can’t find it.
- There is zero support for installing Oracle 10g on Fedora 17. If you specify that particular combination, the script will simply warn you of your error and then stop. (Oracle 10g is no longer a supported RDBMS, even by Oracle Corporation themselves, after all!)
- Fedora 17 thoughtfully(!) decided to alter the output of the ifconfig command, so the bit where it’s supposed to write the IP address and hostname to the /etc/hosts file couldn’t work with the original code. A modified version now deals with Fedora 17′s unique ifconfig output correctly. (For the record, in every other distro I can think of, ifconfig outputs results with the string inet address:w.x.y.z, which allowed me to use the colon as a delimiter to extract just the IP address components. Fedora 17 instead outputs inet w.x.y.z …no colon, and meaning I now have to use the ‘t’ of ‘inet’ as the delimiter. Let’s hope “inet” is “inet” in languages other than English: and apologies if not).
- I’ve tested Gladstone with both the full DVD installation media and a hard-disk installation from the Live CD version of Fedora 17. Both work fine.
I’ve also taken the opportunity to add in support for Centos 5.8, Scientific Linux 6.2 and one or two other mainline versions that appeared to have slipped through the cracks. If I’ve still managed to miss any, let me know. I see Red Hat has recently released 6.3… I am guessing Centos and SL won’t be far behind, so a further update will be required then!
The modified Gladstone shell script is available from the usual place!
Isn’t ifconfig obsolete?
Well, I guess you’re supposed to use the “ip” command to actually set or change the configuration of your networking interfaces.
But ifconfig is still there in all distros, still documented, still outputs the information Gladstone needs and still works perfectly fine as a way of merely reading network configuration information… so I guess it depends on your definition of ‘obsolete’.
Besides, I also use HP-UX, AIX and Solaris, where ifconfig is still king (I think ip ‘replacing’ ifconfig is only a Linux thing). So I’ll be using it for some time to come, and I’ll still write scripts using it, until such time as it actually stops working in any particular situation.
One definition of “obsolete” is… it says so in the manual! For something like 10 years for linux. Yes, only linux. BSD, where it came from, still develops it, Solaris is limiting it. hp-ux seems to be doing nothing, though one wonders seeing nwmgr replacing the lan stuff (we’ve had way too many issues with minor versions of hp-ux versus various network and disk hardware). Someone made a rosetta stone: http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
Lest anyone get the wrong idea, gladstone is a great script and any criticism is intended to be constructive.
I certainly find the discussion constructive, so no worries on that score.
The only thing I can add, I guess, is that whilst I was aware that ifconfig has been declared obsolete/deprecated in Linux going back quite a while and was last actively developed around 2001, it is deprecated mostly because of it’s inability to reliably deal with complex network environments with routing, tunnels and such. Hopefully, Gladstone is not run in such environments!
On the other hand, the fact that Fedora’s output for the ifconfig command has changed in this release suggest someone is still at least ‘tinkering’ with the code, making it perhaps slightly less dead and obsolete than the manuals might say!
Additionally, I didn’t get much response from a man ifconfig | grep obsolete, so I guess my manual’s not the same as yours!
Interesting. Fedora 16 (among others) said it, http://linuxmanpages.net/manpages/fedora16/man8/ifconfig.8.html . I don’t have any handy, and can’t seem to find F-17 man ifconfig online, so I don’t know what you see with man ifconfig. But things I can find online (like the admin manual) do use it in examples, so it is hard to say if they have decided it’s not going away.
Can you upload script because i have 404
Sorry about that. It’s all the one thing,so it sounds as though I’ve managed to break quite a lot of links about the place. Give me an hour or so…
Now fixed. Funnily enough, it was the only one broken. Had I merely pointed you to the Downloads link at the top of the site… well, everything there worked just fine all the time.
My apologies, and article has been corrected.