Oracle silent installation using response file

Earlier in  Using Putty + Xming for X forwarding I mentioned how to setup X forwarding for oracle installation. Actually I have been using response file on most of the systems I configured.

The advantages of silent install using response file are:
1. All the installations are identical, so the setup is consistent across different environment.
2. No X required during the installation, just the normal ssh to server is sufficient.
3. Installation is simpler, just trigger the command, no need to click on different installing screen.

The most important part of silent install is the response file. Oracle installation binary contains a folder called response. From there we can modify the db installation rsp file. Many lines in the file are comments, so the file is self-explanatory. In 10g response file, the most important parameters to configure are:

UNIX_GROUP_NAME, ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_HOME_NAME, INSTALL_TYPE

Once the response file is ready, we can install oracle binary by calling OUI
runInstaller -responseFile /full/path/to/myInstall.rsp -silent

The last few lines of the installation output, we will get some instructions run root.sh as root user. After run root.sh following the instruction, we are done with the installation.

Using Putty + Xming for X forwarding

A few years back, when I remotely installed Oracle in Solaris the first time, I thought exporting X display was the only option I have. I was told to use Xmanager for X forwarding, but Xmanager is not free. After searching around, I found Xming on sourceforge, so I wanted to give Xming a try.

Here is how I export X display to my local PC.
1. Software needed: Putty, Xming
Just search it, you can easily download them, you need to install Xming after downloading.

2. Start Xming
After starting Xming, you will see a small icon at the right bottom corner of your windows screen. Mouse over the icon, it will show "Xming Server:0.0"

3. Launch Putty to connect to remote server, after filling in the "Host Name" and "Port", click "Connection" -> "SSH" -> "X11", tick the checkbox before "Enable X11 forwarding", then click "Open" button.



4. You are connected to remote server with X11 forwarding, start any X application to test the settings are ok.



You can see that we run xterm from putty, will launch a xterm window on the local PC.

Reference: http://courses.cms.caltech.edu/cs11/misc/xwindows.html