11gR2 Installation Mess

I recently destroyed (on purpose this time) all my Oracle virtual machines. It was time for me to re-install to see if I had actually learned anything. The short story, I haven't learned anything.

I've been using Ubuntu at home for almost 2 years now. I'm much more comfortable working from the CLI, but I'm thankful there's a pretty GUI.

I've even managed to install the Oracle database on Linux. What's that you say? I did document it here. In my eyes, that was nothing short of a miracle.

Anyway, to my subject of my post.

For 2 weeks now I have been trying to rebuild my virtual machines. Upgraded to Oracle Enterprise Linux 5, Update 5 (Carcinogen? Carthage?). Easy, takes 6 minutes.

Download the 64 bit software from OTN. File 1 and File 2.

Unzip the files.

Install (software only).



If somehow I made it past the installation of the binaries, I'd get this running the DBCA.



Googling seemed to provide a consensus, make sure the checksum after downloaded matches what is on the download page.

Easy enough.

Here's what is on the page:

linux.x64_11gR2_database_1of2.zip (1,239,269,270 bytes) (cksum - 3152418844)
linux.x64_11gR2_database_2of2.zip (1,111,416,131 bytes) (cksum - 3669256139)

From the OEL VM:

[oracle@localhost 11gR2]$ cksum linux.x64_11gR2_database_1of2.zip 
856173531 1239269270 linux.x64_11gR2_database_1of2.zip
[oracle@localhost 11gR2]$ cksum linux.x64_11gR2_database_2of2.zip 
3669256139 1111416131 linux.x64_11gR2_database_2of2.zip

OK, the first file doesn't match. WTF? I run it from my machine.

oraclenerd@oraclenerd:/media/software/oracle$ cksum linux.x64_11gR2_database_1of2.zip 
3152418844 1239269270 linux.x64_11gR2_database_1of2.zip
oraclenerd@oraclenerd:/media/software/oracle$ cksum linux.x64_11gR2_database_2of2.zip 
3669256139 1111416131 linux.x64_11gR2_database_2of2.zip

Matches.

Copy it over to the other machine.

It doesn't match.

Move it over to the other machine.

It doesn't match.

Remove everything, re-download. Run the checksum. No match. Just to throw another little twist in, the checksum changes.

I'm pretty sure I've lost my mind at this point.

Anyone encountered something like this before?

Update
Monday January 24, 2011 00:43:00 EST

On Saturday morning I finally go everything running. Not exactly sure what changed, but here's what I did.

With an idea from Mr. Piwowar to use wget to download the files (didn't know there was a CLI to do that...), I used that method. Previously I had issues downloading from eDelivery using Chrome (I'm not the only one, Mr. Seiler has as well). I had tried Firefox and that wouldn't get it either (the checksums wouldn't match).

I tried wget from my host machine using something like this:

wget <url_to_file> --user=$OTN_USERNAME --password=$OTN_PASSWORD

After downloading, I verified the checksum.

I then went into my guest system and used the same method. The checksum on the first file matched, but not on the second. It actually changed 2 times while calculating it...which is weird. Anyway, I gave the copy across shared folders method a try again. Ran the checksum and it matched. I now had 2 files that were validated against the checksum.

I unzipped and installed the software with no issues. I then ran dbca and...it worked.

I wish I could explain what went wrong and where it went wrong, but I cannot. At least I have a working 11gR2 database now. Time to break it some other way.