Axel's root Blog

for nerds only - little stories from the everyday sysadmin life with problems and their hard-to-find solutions

Oracle EE refused to install into OpenVZ

2010-02-07 by Axel Reinhold, tagged as openvz, oracle
Oracle Express Edition 10g refused to install into an OpenVZ container with the following message: This system does not meet the minimum requirements for swap space.

I analysed the install script in the rpm-file and found the script using the free-command to get information for the swap space.

So i installed my own free-command which simply lies about swap with this script: 

#!/bin/sh
mv /usr/bin/free /usr/bin/free.orig
cat >/usr/bin/free <<'EOF'
#!/bin/sh
cat <<'__eof'
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1048576     327264     721312          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:     327264     721312
Swap:      2000000          0    2000000
__eof
exit
EOF
chmod 755 /usr/bin/free
exit
After that the rpm-install works without a problem:
rpm -Uvh oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm

Do not forget to reinstall the original free-command with:
mv /usr/bin/free.orig /usr/bin/free