I installed Solaris Express on my Ultra 2 next, which has the following hardware:
2 x 300 MHz UltraSparc II CPU's
1536 MB of memory (8 x 501-3136 and 8 x 501-2480)
2 Sun StorEdge Multipack 12 disk external enclosures
2 Sun S/WIS Fast Wide SCSI/ Fast Ethernet cards (501-2739)
2 Quantum Atlas V 18 GB SCSI disks
6 IBM DPSS-309170M 9 GB SCSI disks
Sun Type 5 keyboard and mouse
The installation of Solaris Express is the same as above except the following:
1. Since there are three network interfaces, you have a choice as to which interface is primary. In this instance I chose hme0 (the system board integrated interface) as the primary.
2. With this system having two external disk enclosures and 8 hard disks, you can choose which disk will be the boot drive. I chose the first drive on the first controller (c1t2d0), an 18 GB Quantum Atlas V as the boot drive.
3. A Full Distribution installation has 628 packages which includes:
a. IPlanet Directory Server (LDAP) b. Apache web server c. Sun ONE Application Server d. BOOTP/DHCP Server e. Fair Share Scheduler f. Sun ONE Message Queue g. Kerberos Server h. Solaris Volume Manager (the replacement for Solstice DiskSuite) i. Solaris Management Console j. Samba SMB/CIFS fileserver k. Web Based Enterprise Management services (WBEM) l. Support for NIS and NIS+ m. sendmail (based on version 8.12) n. BIND (based on version 8.3.3)
The difference between a Full Distribution and Full Distribution with OEM Support is that the Full Distribution with OEM Support installs specific drivers and utilities for running Solaris on Fujitsu hardware (Sparc) and HP/Compaq hardware (Intel). There is a lot of software installed, and depending on the function of the machine most of it can be removed.
Partitioning of the disk is as follows: c1t2d0s0 / 1536 c1t2d0s1 swap 2048 c1t2d0s3 /var 3072 c1t2d0s4 /usr 3072 c1t2d0s5 /opt 1024 c1t2d0s6 /export/home 6244
This leaves 437 MB of free space for Solaris Volume Manager state database replicas. Each replica consumes 8 MB of disk space; this is a 100% increase over the replica size with Solstice Disk Suite that shipped with Solaris 8 and earlier. I also tend to give partitions a lot of space; it is better to give them too much than too little.
I mirrored the root disk and then created three mirrors for the installation of Oracle 9i. I modified /etc/system with these lines:
set md_mirror:md_resync_bufsz=2048 set maxphys=0x400000
The first line creates buffers for faster resynchronization of disks and the second sets aside four megabytes of memory for disk buffers. I also modified /kernel/drv/sd.conf with this line:
sd_max_xfer_size=0x400000;
This sets the maximum data transfer rate to 4 MB as opposed to the default 1 MB. Reads and writes were observed to be faster (I did not measure this using any synthetic benchmark).
Installation of Oracle 9i
One of the new features of Solaris Express is the dynamic configuration of System V IPC parameters. Without making any changes or adding any parameters to /etc/system I attempted to start Oracle and got the following messages:
ERROR: ORA-01034: ORACLE not available ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist SVR4 Error: 2: No such file or directory
To verify that it was not a configuration issue I put the following lines in /etc/system and rebooted the machine:
set shmsys:shminfo_shmmax=1073741824 set shmsys:shminfo_shmmin=1 set shmsys:shminfo_shmmni=100 set shmsys:shminfo_shmseg=10 set semsys:seminfo_semmns=2000 set semsys:seminfo_semmsl=1000 set semsys:seminfo_semmni=100 set semsys:seminfo_semopm=100 set semsys:seminfo_semvmx=32767
I was able to start the database successfully with the modifications to /etc/system, so I removed them and rebooted the machine and used the various resource management commands to set these parameters dynamically. Here are the values before modification:
process.max-msg-messages syslog=off [ deny ] process.max-msg-qbytes syslog=off [ deny ] process.max-sem-ops syslog=off [ deny ] process.max-sem-nsems syslog=off [ deny ] project.max-shm-memory syslog=off [ no-basic deny ] project.max-shm-ids syslog=off [ no-basic deny ] project.max-msg-ids syslog=off [ no-basic deny ] project.max-sem-ids syslog=off [ no-basic deny ]
Using the Solaris Management Console GUI (SMC) I created a project called Oracle and assigned users and groups to the project. The parameters above could not be added or modified from SMC. I then ran the following commands to setup the parameters necessary to run Oracle (not all of them are shown); the results are shown below as the user oracle without the database active:
# newtask -p oracle
# id -p uid=300(oracle) gid=301(oinstall) projid=100(oracle)
# prctl -n project.max-shm-memory -i project oracle 2184: ksh project.max-shm-memory [ no-basic deny ] 386320384 privileged deny 18446744073709551615 system deny [ max ]
# prctl -n project.max-shm-ids -i project oracle 2184: ksh project.max-shm-ids [ no-basic deny ] 128 privileged deny 16777216 system deny [ max ]
Once I had made the changes I stated the database without any problems. What I found interesting is that the values I modified on the command line were not shown in SMC for either the project or the task. I am hoping this is something that will be fixed in the future. I will admit that I am new to the use of projects in Solaris, but I could not make the modifications I made to allow Oracle to run from SMC.
- "Solaris Express review, Page 1"
- "Solaris Express review, Page 2"
- "Solaris Express review, Page 3"
