building an oracle 11g soa install on centos5

Over the last few days I've built a CentOS 5 VMware machine with Oracle SOA 11.1.1.3 installed. This was essentially mirror of the system I built on Window to see what the issues would be and I had to work round the following:

1. If you use the VMware easy install option when creating the root partition is too small to put Oracle XE on. I used GParted to increase the partition size.
   
   
2. I didn't name the VM to begin with and ended up with localhost.localdomain. When I decided that wasn't a good idea I looked at some forums and documentation such as this one but ended up using the approach from Bob here. As root in the console type setup and then go to “Network Configuration” and edit the DNS config. Also update the /etc/hosts file.
   
   
3. When I transferred the files contained in ofm_soa_generic_11.1.1.2.0_disk1_1of1 and changed to Disk1 directory and ran ./runInstaller -jreLoc JRE_LOCATION I got a permission errors. I then tried using a oraclewls user for the sftp and running the installer, copying to /tmp instead of the oraclesoa home, checking permission on the JDK and extensive internet searching. The documentation says that it cant be run as root so that wasn't an option. The simple answer eluded me which was to chmod -R 777 ofm_soa_generic_11.1.1.2.0_disk1_1of doh!
4. I updated /etc/security/limits.conf to add

• * soft nofile 4096
• * hard nofile 4096

and also had to install some library updates which were:

• compat-db.i386 0:4.2.52-5.1
• sysstat.i386 0:7.0.2-3.el5
• compat-libstdc++-296.i386 0:2.96-138

using yum install . That got me up and running and looking at:

which was great. I then started configuring the weblogic server to support the development work from the hands on tutorial I've been working through.

Pete Raymond