pfs_mount for oracle and installation of PHCO_16438

[Duane Gorder]

I really have two related questions. The first is our pfs_mounted cdrom hung up about 15 minutes into the loading of the Oracle software. It had loaded about 251MB of data. The hang seemed to be like any other pfs_mount hang - only a reboot would fix it. The first time Predictive suggested replacing the cd_rom drive (event #100251). The second time Predictive suggested that the request contained an illegal mode value for the desired track (event #102276). Does this suggest maybe a bad cd disk? The second question regards PHCO_16438. The doc says to "swlist -l fileset -a state | grep -i phco_16438/pachrdme/english". Well I have PHCO_16438.CORE-ENG-A-MAN configured and PHCO_16438.UX-CORE configured, but I can't find the "PACHRDME/ENGLISH". Do I need to do some more configuring of some sort?

Thank you.

[Christopher McCray_1]

Check out doc# KBAN00000252 under mainteneance and support --> technical knowledge base, which states other patches you may/maynot be missing. I hope this helps out.

Chris

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Duane,

If you have patched the system as per the patch requirements listed in the Oracle installation manual for HP-UX (downloadable in pdf format from oracle website) and the kernel parameters are also set as per their requirements, then it looks like you have a bad Oracle installation CD. Try to change the CD and see if it works.

Hope you have followed the pfs mount procedure by book. Everybody hates that, but have got to live with it till some other solution comes up.

Hope this helps

Thanks

[Duane Gorder]

Thank you. The recommended doc helped clear things up and a new CD worked just fine without changing or adding any patches

[Santosh Nair_1]

Duane,

This isn't directly related to your question, but as a suggestion, I would say stay away from pfs_mounts as much as possible. I can't count the number of times I've had to reboot machine just to get a clean mount and even then the moons had to be in perfect alignment for me to get all the data off the CD.

For Oracle installs, what we've been doing is copying the contents of the Oracle install CD(s) onto a stage area and NFS mount the stage area onto the machine where we'd do the actual install. Believe me, the install is almost 3x faster than when using pfs_mount.

Hope this helps.

-Santosh

[Jim Turner]

Hi Duane,

I'll second Santosh's strategy. There's a reason it's called the "Pitiful" File System -- it stinks! We quit installing from CD about a year ago. Now we do as Santosh outlines. If you have multiple machines to install with the same Oracle version/apps, using a central location via NFS is great. We seem to have multiple, unique installs, and in those cases we pfs_mount to the new box, puddle-move the CD contents to a staging area right on the new box, then run the Oracle install locally. You wanna talk about seeing an Oracle install fly? (Well, okay, in comparison to *other* install scenarios with such a bloated product.)

All the best,
Jim

[Sridhar Rami reddy]

Hi Santosh,
We are having the problems with the ORACLE 8.1.7 installation on Hp-UX 11.0, our SYSADMN is trying to finding out the problem, i think the problem is with the pfs mount. so would you please let me know the steps in copying the CD contents to hard disk and install from that file system, i am a DBA, so not sure in doing HP-UX tasks. so clear instructions will really be appreciated.
thanks

[Santosh Nair_1]

Hi,

Basically, you'll have to mount the CD using pfsmount and just copy over the contents of the CD using cp -rp or tar...i.e.:

with the Oracle CD in machineA:
pfs_mountd&
pfsd&
echo /dev/dsk/c4t2d0 /cdrom pfs-rrip xlat=unix 0 > /etc/pfs_fstab # where c4t2d0 is the cdrom device.
pfs_mount /cdrom

then cd /cdrom
tar cpf - . |(cd /stage_area;tar xpvf -)

Once the copy is done, you can install from the /stage_area. You can also set this up as a NFS export and mount it on other machines to do installs on those machines.

-Santosh