The beautiful thing about installing Oracle Database (11g in this case), is that when you reboot the linux machine, it doesn’t come back up. Also, there isn’t a singular command that starts it up either.

Awesome.

My biggest hurdle was figuring out how to start the Enterprise Manager web console. I knew that if I could get that up and running, I should be ok.

Trial by fire:

Error #1: Environment variable ORACLE_UNQNAME not defined. Please set ORACLE_UNQNAME to database unique name.

Solution #1: Remember, we’re talking linux here, so run: export ORACLE_UNQNAME=[Global Database Name]    (it’s default is orcl)

Error #2: [ORACLE_HOME]/localhost.localdomain_[DB NAME] not found.

Solution #2: This happens because if you don’t have ORACLE_HOSTNAME set, it’ll pull the domain name out of the first line of your /etc/hosts file (which is localhost.localdomain by default on OEL5). Just edit the hosts file, or edit the variable.

Now you should be able to run: emctl start dbconsole

Later!

.: Adam