Some issues about ADRCI in Oracle 11g

In Oracle11g Oracle introduced a new feature called Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR). All the diagnostic information including the found incidents will be stored in the repository. The repository is actually an OS directory. Along with this feature, Oracle also introduced a new command line utility called adrci (Automatic Diagnostic Repository Command Interpreter) to make the info. retrieval  from the ADR easy. There are already some articles around talking a lot of ADR. Here is a good one: ADR So I am not going to get in depth about ADR itself. Instead I am going to talk about some issues I encountered using 'adrci'.

Some reported there was an editor issue using adrci 'show alert'. This can be easily solved by 'set editor'. While the error messages may appear different on UNIX and Windows, 'set editor' works on both platforms.

adrci> show alert

ADR Home = /app/oracle/diag/rdbms/chooyu/chooyu:
*************************************************************************
Output the results to file: /tmp/alert_12361_1_chooyu_1.ado
screen: Unknown terminal type
I don't know what kind of terminal you are on - all I have is 'screen'.
[Using open mode]
"/tmp/alert_12361_1_chooyu_1.ado" 989 lines, 43823 characters
2007-11-13 12:27:30.840000 +08:00
:q
Additional information: 256
Additional information: 13

adrci> set editor vim

Another issue is related to the OS permissions. Usually nobody will encounter this issue. However, if you create 2 OS groups, one is for Oracle Software Owner and the other is for DBA, you will probably hit this issue while signing in under DBA group. This is because Oracle sets all the directories under the owner's control during the installation. In my case, I created 2 groups 'oinstall' and 'dba' as well as 2 users 'oracle' and 'swong'. I use 'oracle' as the Software owner as always. The ownership of all the directories would be oracle:oinstall. If I sign in as 'swong' which I put under 'dba', I won't be able to find any home but only listener. How to solve the issue then? In Solaris, I need to use 'setfacl' to allow 'dba' group to access DIAGNOSTIC_DEST. After that you'll be able to see several homes using 'show home' adrci command. You may need to 'set base' first. Please see below.

$ adrci

ADRCI: Release 11.1.0.6.0 - Beta on Fri Nov 16 14:18:17 2007

Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

No ADR base is set
adrci> set base /app/oracle
adrci> show home
ADR Homes:
diag/rdbms/orcl/orcl
diag/clients/user_unknown/host_411310321_11
diag/tnslsnr/myhost/listener
diag/diagtool/user_swong/host_2847951770_11

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Install BeleniX (OpenSolaris Live CD) into a USB thumb drive

BeleniX Live CD works just fine. But when you try to install it into a USB thumb drive following the installation instruction, you may get frustrated. The installer doesn't work! At least it doesn't work for me. I had to debug the installer script step by step to see where the problems result from. Finally, I worked out and successfully installed it into a USB drive. There are two places in the script to which you need to pay attention.

• the command at line 211

# rmformat -s /tmp/slices /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0p0

This command simply doesn't work in my case. Maybe the slices information in /tmp/slices generated by the script are not correct, maybe not. Since there was no error returned, I have no idea why it failed. After running this command, 2 slices are supposed to be created and labeled. However, if you run the following command

# newfs /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 < /dev/null

You will get error "no such device" sth. like that. In this case, you can run the command below instead to create the slices and label them based on /tmp/slices

# format -e

It's interactive. You just follow the instructions to do so.

• The command at line 281

# installgrub -mf stage1 stage2 $devs > /dev/null

You will get error "can not read stage1 file stage1" if you follow the provided installer. The reason is there is no such a file called stage1 in /boot/grub directory. Where you can get the required stage1? Don't run

# umount /mnt/belenix

at line 274. You need to run the commands below first:

# cd /mnt/belenix/boot/grub
# installgrub -mf stage1 stage2 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 > /dev/null
# umount /mnt/belenix
# lofiadm -d $BELENIX_ISO_PATH

All the required files to run installgrub are in /mnt/belenix/boot/grub.

A successful installation! You can enjoy the LiveUSB boot from now on!