Determining If an Oracle Inventory and Oracle Inventory Group Exist

Determine if you have an existing Oracle central inventory, and ensure that you use the same Oracle Inventory for all Oracle software installations. Also, ensure that all Oracle software users you intend to use for installation have permissions to write to this directory.

When you install Oracle software on the system for the first time, OUI creates the oraInst.loc file. This file identifies the name of the Oracle Inventory group (by default, oinstall), and the path of the Oracle central inventory directory. If you have an existing Oracle central inventory, then ensure that you use the same Oracle Inventory for all Oracle software installations, and ensure that all Oracle software users you intend to use for installation have permissions to write to this directory.

An oraInst.loc file contains lines in the following format, where central_inventory_location is the path to an existing Oracle central inventory, and group is the name of the operating system group whose members have permissions to write to the central inventory:

inventory_loc=central_inventory_location
inst_group=group

Use the more command to determine if you have an Oracle central inventory on your system. For example:

# more /var/opt/oracle/oraInst.loc

inventory_loc=/u01/app/oraInventory
inst_group=oinstall

Use the command grep groupname /etc/group to confirm that the group specified as the Oracle Inventory group still exists on the system. For example:

$ grep oinstall /etc/group
oinstall:x:54321:grid,oracle

Note:

Do not put the oraInventory directory under the Oracle base directory for a new installation, because that can result in user permission errors for other installations.

Parent topic: Creating Groups, Users and Paths for Oracle Grid Infrastructure