Timothy E. Archer

With the servers that I manage, I sometimes need to run a command that starts some sort of GUI interface requiring an X server. This holds especially true if the server holds an Oracle database. The GUI tools Oracle provides make it easy to install Oracle, use the database configuration assistant (DBCA), run the wallet manager (OWM), and other utilities, however they all require an X Server.

What I don’t like to do is to have to determine my local computer’s IP address, and from the Unix server manually export my DISPLAY to that IP address every time I want to run one of the programs requiring an X server.

Instead, what I do on my RedHat Linux AS3 servers is edit the /etc/profile script, and add in one simple line: continue reading…

One minor thing I do on all of my unix based Oracle database servers is setup the shell prompt to give me some key information. Namely, I always want to see my current directory, the user I am logged in as, the server I am logged into, and my current ORACLE_SID. Since I typically have many servers, oracle instances, and shell sessions open to manage them all, its easy to get confused as to what server and database your executing commands against.

My solution to this is to setup my shell prompt to show all of this information. The instructions I provide below will show you how to do this on a RedHat Linux AS3 system. It should work on most other Linux systems, and needs minor modifications for use on Sun Solaris systems. continue reading…