Oracle Installation and DHCP

Last week I was trying to install Oracle 10g R2 on RHEL5.4 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). The RHEL5.4 was configured as DHCP. On the "Product Specific Prerequisite Checks" page of "Oracle Universal Installer" (OUI), I encounterned following warning

Checking Network Configuration requirements ...
Check complete. The overall result of this check is: Failed <<<<
Problem: The install has detected that the primary IP address of the system is DHCP-assigned.
Recommendation: Oracle supports installations on systems with DHCP-assigned public IP addresses.  However, the primary network interface on the system should be configured with a static IP address in order for the Oracle Software to function properly.  See the Installation Guide for more details on installing the software on systems configured with DHCP.

Problem: The install has detected that the primary IP address of the system is DHCP-assigned.

So the very simple solution can be to configure RHEL5.4 with the Static IP, but what if I want to install Oracle with Opearting System on DHCP. Considering that "Oracle Universal Installer" was showing just a warning (not a exception).

In Oracle Documentation the solution is given for DHCP with "Windows Operating System" by "Installing a Loopback Adapter"
- http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/install.112/e24186/reqs.htm#NTDBI2715

Strangly, I was not able to find any solution in Oracle Documentation.



I solved this issue with following steps:

   1) Edit /etc/hosts to have following entries
       # Do not remove the following line, or various programs
       # that require network functionality will fail.
       127.0.0.1 myhost.mydomain.com localhost.localdomain localhost
       ::1 myhost.mydomain.com myhost
       192.168.74.55 myhost.mydomain.com myhost

    2) Add ORACLE_HOSTNAME to /etc/profile.d/oracle.sh (you may need to create it)
       #!/bin/bash
       export ORACLE_HOSTNAME=myhost.mydomain.com

    3) Add HOSTNAME to /etc/sysconfig/network
       HOSTNAME=myhost.mydomain.com

    4) Restart the network service
       service network restart

    5) Restart the vnc server (as i was installing from vnc client)
       /etc/init.d/vncserver stop
       /etc/init.d/vncserver start



If you install Oracle with DHCP configured machine, you need to take following steps every time machine gets a new IP:

    1) Reconfiure emconsole by
        emca -deconfig dbcontrol db -repos drop
        emca -config dbcontrol db -repos create

        or

        emca -deconfig dbcontrol db
        emca -config dbcontrol db -repos recreate
        http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/em.102/b40002/structure.htm#sthref92

    2) Need to update New IP on all the ora files