Friday, November 20, 2009

GUI Pain

You guessed it, I not a big fan of GUI’s. Now before you run off on a tangent, I will agree that they have their place and can be very valuable at times. At the same time I think that if you can’t function at the command-line on the console then you got problems. It is important to understand what the GUI is doing in the background.

Let me give you a non-oracle real world example. I have personally experienced younger generation cashiers at connivance stores who were not able to make change because the register was down. They were dependent on the tool and needed it to do the work for them.

An outage situation with a down production system that is costing you dollars by the minute and SLA’s are occurring at an alarming rate… well, that is just not the time to be GUI bound.

GUI’s – use them, benefit from them; just understand how-to with out them.

Anyway, on to the subject at hand:

Earlier today I was trying to install Oracle 11gR1 (11.1.0.6… which I will patch to .7 and of course bring all of the missing CPU’s patches up -to-date) on a Linux server. My GUI pain started when I realized that I could not do this the way I use to do it (via setting the DISPLAY variable, etc.) because we had switched to using FirePass for access to our network.

So here is what I did to get this to work:

• I downloaded and installed a free version of x-mins on my laptop from (www.hotfiles.com).
• I started the ‘X Server Root’ed Full Screen’ option.
• I started putty and under the ‘connection’ tab I clicked on the ‘ssh’ tab and then I clicked on the X11 tab and selected the ‘X11 forwarding’ option and save it for the sever I wanted to do the install on.
• Then I logged onto the server (in this case, linux) and become the oracle user. (Note: for this to work the oracle user cannot be set to ‘/bin/false’)
• Then I entered the following command: ssh –X oracle@localhost
• This then prompted me for the oracle user password. Input the password and then I was back at a prompt as the oracle user.
• I cd’ed to the location of the runinstaller executable and executed it (./runInstaller).
• When I did this I got the following error message:
[oracle@ database]$ ./runInstaller
Starting Oracle Universal Installer...

Checking Temp space: must be greater than 120 MB. Actual 3785 MB Passed
Checking swap space: must be greater than 150 MB. Actual 8189 MB Passed
Checking monitor: must be configured to display at least 256 colors
>>> Could not execute auto check for display colors using command /usr/bin/xdpyinfo. Check if the DISPLAY variable is set. Failed <<<<

Some requirement checks failed. You must fulfill these requirements before

continuing with the installation, at which time they will be rechecked.

Continue? (y/n) [n] n

User Selected: No

Exiting Oracle Universal Installer, log for this session can be found at /u01/app/oracle/oraInventory/logs/installActions2009-11-20_09-39-29AM.log

• I just selected the ‘y’ (yes) option and the installer GUI came up in the fullscreen X window and worked like a charm.

When you run a GUI tool on the remote server, it should automatically be relinked to your local desktop. If this is not the case, then verify that the forward X11 is not set to "no" in /etc/ssh/ssh_config on the remote server. This can be accomplished as follows:

become root
root@$ grep ForwardX11 /etc/ssh/ssh_config
# ForwardX11 no
ForwardX11Trusted yes

Well, there you have it. Have a great day!