When restaring the VM oracle didn't seem to be there. Yes the listener was there, but that was about it. Where did the database go?
hmm let's see
Connecting on the machine itself with an sql*plus
ORA-01034: ORACLE not available
ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist
Linux-x86_64 Error: 2: No such file or directory
Process ID: 0
Session ID: 0 Serial number: 0
Ok, maybe it just didn't autostart for some reason.
> su -l oracle
> sqlplus / as sysdba
SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.2.0 Production on Thu Nov 3 21:42:28 2011
Copyright (c) 1982, 2011, Oracle. All rights reserved.
Connected to an idle instance.
SQL> startup
ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system
heh?
Memory_target is the new (well since oracle 11) in any case to handle it's memory. instead of defining your PGA and SGA separately you just tell oracle that it can use so much memory and it'll try to determine for itself what the correct ratio for your instance should be. Except now...
Apparently one of the big changes for ubuntu 11.10 was that they've moved away from the /var/run, /var/lock and /dev/shm which oracle used for determining how much shared memory you had. So now you've got 0 bytes of (shared) memory as far as oracle is concerned...
Currently there are 2 workarounds for it:
* modify the binary oracle executable (I'd rather not, thank you)
* tell oracle what ratio to use instead of letting it figure it out for itself.
So latter approach seemed fit.
Ok here we go:
> sqlplus / as sysdba
> create pfile='koen.ini' from spfile;
File created.
vi ./product/11.2.0/xe/dbs/koen.ini
remove the memory_target entry and replace it by
pga_aggregate_target=200540160
sga_target=601620480
> sqlplus / as sysdba
> startup pfile=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe/dbs/koen.ini
ORACLE instance started.
Total System Global Area 601272320 bytes
Fixed Size 2228848 bytes
Variable Size 180358544 bytes
Database Buffers 415236096 bytes
Redo Buffers 3448832 bytes
Database mounted.
Database opened.
Et voila..
Hope this helps someone having the same issue..
