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 theoraInventory
directory under the Oracle base directory for a new installation, because that can result in user permission errors for other installations.
Parent topic: Required Operating System Groups and Users