I had to get this working environment up on an old system at work (programmers get to do hardware, yay!) Running on some old SPARC boxes with not-so-healthy drives and broken backups. Sat back and watched Solaris 9 take about half a day to install! Then the nightmare began…

Next you run into issues with your standard Solaris SPARC machine being headless and Oracle deciding to require a GUI and X windows when all you would do is click ‘ok’ four or five times. So off you go setting up the server to allow remote X connections, only Solaris is bolted down in a number of places to stop this happening (think security.) SSH -x may do some things but not all you need on Solaris!

In case your getting the handy “timeout locking .Xauthority” message, as root you need to copy the /.Xauthority file into the users home directory. Then give ownership using chown to the user. You may need to set up the user’s home directory, have a look at the contents of /etc/passwd to see where the user’s home directory is located. This should reside in /export/home/username/

Then when you actually get xclock and friends running you hit another wall. Oracle needs to link a bunch of files, but Solaris 9 does not come with the required tools! Being an old system you do not get a nice apitude style installer for simple dependencies; you have to go dig around for them yourselves. In case you’re wondering where to go, they’ve been hidden on the second of three install CDs.. Then Oracle will probably crash out for another reason and you’ll be left wanting to grab the nearest gun/axe/chainsaw and finish off the decrepid system yourself.

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© jim for 406 Not Acceptable, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: databases, Solaris, ssh, Xauthority

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