New Job, New responsibilities

Recently I started a new job with the added benefit that I have some new stuff to learn. Previously I managed EBS environments with a few standalone databases and I will be doing that here as well. Additionally they also use Oracle Portal, Oracle Internet Directory and standalone application server.

I haven't used these before so I thought I would setup a vmware environment, install it and start plugging away. For the life of me, I couldn't find the install guide for the application server. After I wasted enough time looking I decided to uncompress the software and move forward anyways. It was then that I noticed the docs subfolder under Disk1, which containg an install guide.

The first step of the install is to execute runInstaller and check for pre-reqs:

prompt> mount_point/1012disk1/runInstaller -executeSysPrereqs

The OS, temp and swap space checks passed but failed checking the display:

Checking monitor: must be configured to display at least 256 colors. Failed <<<<
>>>> could not execute auto check for display colors using command
/usr/X11R6/bin/xdpyinfo. Check if the DISPLAY variable is set.

I was local to the box and my display was working properly.. I could also execute xdpyinfo manually and it would work ok. However, a which xdpyinfo turned up that the program resided in a different directory than the one runInstaller was trying to use.

[oracle@localhost Disk1]$ which xdpyinfo
/usr/bin/xdpyinfo
[oracle@localhost bin]$ ln -s /usr/bin/xdpyinfo /usr/X11R6/bin/xdpyinfo

So I created a symbolic link, as you can see above and tried executing runInstaller again. This time everything passed.

Not much of a tip a day... Just wanted to mention that I had started a new job and hopefully the dry spell of posts is over. I was very idle in my previous position (one of the reasons why I left), which made it more difficult to think of stuff to blog. I'll be using some new pieces of software now and we are in the process of implementing a new R12 environment. So I should have alot to talk about soon.