SUSE Manager install failure

[Werner Flamme]

Hi everyone,

to manage our herd of virtual SLES 11, we bought a SUSE manager. A test
installation with a local PostgreSQL database went fine, but the
software does not install with the remote Oracle DB.

The setup process tells me it is populating the database, and after some
time I get

traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/sbin/mgr-ncc-sync", line 107, in <module>
main()
File "/usr/sbin/mgr-ncc-sync", line 64, in main
fromdir=options.fromdir)
File
"/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/spacewalk/susemanager/mgr_ncc_sync_lib.py",
line 97, in __init__
raise Exception("Could not read mirror credentials. Please make "
Exception: Could not read mirror credentials. Please make sure that
server.susemanager.mirrcred_user and server.susemanager.mirrcred_pass
are set correctly in the configuration file.

The latest sentence seems to make sense: the setup routine does not copy
the mentioned info into the file /etc/rhn/rhn.conf.

I did "zypper ref", "zypper patch" and so on after the initial
installation before rebooting and starting "yast2 susemanager_install".
I think that the installation routine for remote Oracle DBs is buggy
(since everything went fine with the local PostgreSQL DB).

Yes, I added the info manually - I opened a second console for doing so.
But:

- after asking "information is gathered, begin install Yes/No"
/etc/rhn/rhn.conf is rewritten from scratch
- before I could re-enter the last command again (cat'ting the info to
the file), the installation was over :-(

I opened a call, but it seems to take ages for mails from novell.com to
me. I see an answer (from today) in the web view of the call, but still
no mail in my inbox.

And retrying the install results in empty logfiles an the setup routine
hangs at "Populating the database".

Anyone here who knows how to work around this problem?

Regards,
Werner
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[Werner Flamme]

Hi Werner,
What is the version of the Oracle DB and of the client ?

Hi Bart,

the database is an Oracle 11.2.0.3 running on an Oracle Database
Appliance, the client was installed by the setup routines from the SUSE
repos after choosing Oracle database as backend.

# rpm -qa '*ora*' | sort
oracle-config-1.1-0.11.4
oracle-instantclient11_2-basic-11.2.0.3.0-0.6.1
oracle-instantclient11_2-sqlplus-11.2.0.3.0-0.6.1
oracle-lib-compat-11.2.0.6.5-0.5.1
quartz-oracle-1.8.4-0.9.3
spacewalk-backend-sql-oracle-1.7.38.22-0.5.1
spacewalk-java-oracle-1.7.54.22-0.5.3
spacewalk-oracle-1.7.3.2-0.5.7
yast2-storage-2.17.127.2-0.5.3
yast2-storage-lib-2.17.127.2-0.5.3

Regards,
Werner

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[Werner Flamme]

Hello Werner,
Somewhere in your mail from yesterday I saw "spacewalker". I know there used to be an issue with Spacewalker and an 11g client...
It was possible to use an 11g DB, but I installed a 10g client on the server where Spacewalker was running and it worked without any issue.
Best regards,
Bart

Hi Bart,

the Oracle client is installed automatically by "yast2
susemanager_setup". I hope that the installation was tested before the
system was sold.

AFAIK the main problem is that the setup does not write the NCC
credentials to /etc/rhn/rhn.conf and thus the setup crashes. The
credentials are written when I use the locally available PostgreSQL.

The other error (ORA-02291: integrity constraint
(SUSEMANAGER.RHN_PACKAGESYNCBL_PNID_FK) violated - parent key not found)
may result from the unsuccessful try gathering the allowed channels for
our installation.

BTW, in the web interface at novell.com/center I see a response to my
support call. I read "by mail", but the mail has not yet arrived in my
mailbox. Hm, maybe they discoverd that snailmail is more reliable than
their groupware mails :->

Regards,
Werner

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[Werner Flamme]

Post by Werner Flamme
Hi everyone,
to manage our herd of virtual SLES 11, we bought a SUSE manager. A test
installation with a local PostgreSQL database went fine, but the
software does not install with the remote Oracle DB.

JFTR: The problem was solved with

"alter system set deferred_segment_creation=FALSE"

on the database server. Plus maybe applying all the patches in the 3
months we waited.

Regards,
Werner

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