Wouldn’t it just be your luck that you go to install OBI 11g and during the pre-requisites check one of the sections fail, you choose to ignore it, and then a week later your OBI server goes down because you forgot to flip a switch or change a setting from the very beginning?  This post attempts to help alleviate that from becoming your fate by speaking to the only part of the OBIEE 11g pre-requisite on Linux that continually fails during my installations.  I’m speaking about the Kernel parameters pre-req check:

You can Google the hard/soft nofiles kernel parameters and their purpose because I will not explain it here.

Ultimately these configuration settings are stored in the /etc/security/limits.config file.  You will need to work your VI editor skills to add two lines for the linux user you are conducting the OBI 11g install with.  If you look at my screenshot below you see that I had previously updated this file for the “oracle” user.  That is the user that I used to install the Oracle 11gR2 RDBMS on that machine prior to my OBI 11g install.  Update the file similar to mine – at least meet the limit for which the pre-req check seeks.

Rebooting the machine is the easiest way I found to ensure the settings get impacted.  I’ve tried just refreshing (clicking the back button on the install wizard) the pre-req check while in-stride but that didn’t work after the change was made.  That left me with the quick reboot option which wasn’t a big deal in my environment.

After the machine came back up, I restarted the OBIEE 11g installation and as you can see below all pre-reqs passed at 100% which nice glowing green check marks.  The install continued and all was good.

Recently digging into the strategy and best practice of installing the OBIEE Applications, mainly the DAC and Informatica  components, I see two common issues arise more often that any others.  One has to do with the Informatica Integration Service not matching the correct locale such at UTF-8 or MS Windows Latin, etc. preventing it from starting and the other has to do with the Informatica or DAC user not able to call the core integration tools pmrep and pmcmd.  This issue is common on Linux/Unix environments but not so much on a Windows server environment.

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Recently I dusted off an old laptop of mine that was peforming terribly with Windows XP since it only had 1/2 GB RAM and the machine is about 4 years old.  So, I wanted to throw a Linux distribution on it.  I was going to wipe the hard drive and then thought to myself that I may actually want to keep the Windows OS as well and just run a dual-boot system.  I’ve done this before when I have installed both OS’s on on fresh HD and had no problems.

I thought this endeavor would also be no problem until I saw that the only volume on the laptop was set as the system partition – Basically only a C: drive consuming all 80GB of hard drive space.  I looked in WIndows Disk Management and there is no tool for reducing a partitioned space.  What?? You can’t shink a partition via Windows?

Then long and short of it is that I was not going to spend money on any Disk Management software like PartitionMagic, etc.  I called a Linux guru buddy of mine and he pointed me to a killer open source bit of software that runs on the Linux Kernel from boot via ISO download to CD burn.  The software is called GParted.  Just download the ISO, burn it to CD (or USB if so skilled), place the CD in the tray and reboot the machine.  GParted will start up (3 minutes or less) and the GUI is really intuitive.  Some user of GParted even wrote a nice detailed post with a checklist and warnings before partitioning a Windows environment, here.

Using GParted I was able to Shrink my parition (clearly I was not using the full HD on the laptop) by a substantial amount making room for a new parition which gets marked as “unallocated”. It took about 30 minutes to go from a full 80GB partition to a 40GB/40GB split.   I think the speed was due to the low RAM.  Once finished GParted reboots the machine and pops out the CD tray on exit.

I popped in my ISO download to CD burn version of Linux Mint 8, installed it and presto, a perfect dual-boot install.  Linux runs fast on this low RAM machine.  Time to install some BI stuff.