If you were like me (15 mins ago), then you would be wondering what the hell is root_squash and what relation does it have with 10g CRS installation. Its due to this, that I’m not able to finish my 10g CRS install.
root_squash happens to be a NFS mount option. Currently I’m setting up a 10g RAC cluster locally in Bangalore, so that the developers have a first hand meet with it. The infrastructure consists of using a NFS storage from NetApp filer, 2 nodes in the cluster. After getting the basic configuration ready, I started with CRS install. It went fine all the way till root.sh execution. When root.sh was run from the first node, I got the following output:
[root@romerac1 crs_r1]# ./root.sh
Checking to see if Oracle CRS stack is already up…/etc/oracle does not exist. Creating it now./bin/chown: changing ownership of `/ocr/voting_ocr/ocr.file’: Operation not permitted
Being in support for some time and doing multiple installations, I was surprised to get an err on chown and that too for the root user ! During the debugging session, I noticed that a file created by root has the nfsnobody for the user & group. Whereas a file created by oracle user has oracle:dba. Why aren’t the files created by root user being owned by root ?
Thats when the security part of NFS comes into play. With root_squash enabled, root users don’t become root user on the filer mount point…for obvious security reasons. So any change of ownership to root user are not permitted and hence the error message.
As of now I’ve raised a priority ticket with the storage ops to get that changed…nahh…no security concerns here as we are way behind many many firewalls (hoping they stay put).
With my first install of 10g RAC in Yahoo! I learnt a new thing about nfs moutpoint. In Oracle all these would have been taken care. The plus point is I get to see ‘new errors’ 🙂 which is good for learning. So hoping for a very exciting time at Y!.
