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Technical Note

Installing Oracle Products Using HTTP

Author: Sudip Datta, Principal Product Manager
Date: January 2004

It is customary for large enterprises to use a single staging server as a centralized source of software products. It has been a longtime practice to map that staging directory as a local directory and install. However, Oracle Universal Installer version 2.3 and above provides the facility to install Oracle software using HTTP. Installing over HTTP brings a more open and extensible procedure to the whole model. The model can extend to a more distributed space where the source and the destination reside on different sides of a firewall.

In this document we discuss the scope and the limitations of our current offerings.

Setting Up the Stage

Different Oracle products typically range from a few MBs to hundreds of MBs in size. The first task would be to put the software on the intended staging server by either copying from the CD or extracting it from an archive. Once copied or extracted, the web server virtual directories have to be set up in such a way that the Disk1 and subdirectories are addressable via HTTP. In the case of products that span multiple CDs, directories Disk2, Disk3 and so on have to be extracted at the same level as Disk1.

The following is an extract from the httpd.conf file in a typical Apache web server configuration:

# DocumentRoot: The directory out of which you will serve documents. By default, all requests are taken from this directory, but # symbolic links and aliases may be used to point to other locations.

DocumentRoot "/private/smpweb/apache_1.3.19/htdocs"

# Each directory to which Apache has access, can be configured with respect to which services and features are allowed and/or
# disabled in that directory (and its subdirectories).

The Disk1 directory must be a subdirectory of the above "DocumentRoot" directory with appropriate access privileges. In our example, Disk1 is a subdirectory of /private/smpweb/apache_1.3.19/htdocs.

After the stage has been set up, one can verify that the products.jar file (products.xml for Oracle Universal Installer version 10.1 and above) can be accessed via the HTTP protocol. This verification, with a browser capable of handling downloadable jars, would produce the following response for the URL specified.

http://oldsmpweb.us.oracle.com/product/software_dist/doc/Disk1/stage/products.jar (See Figure 1)

figure 1

Installing via HTTP

After the products.jar or the products.xml location is published via a web server, the following is required for attended and unattended installs:

Attended Installs

  • Install and invoke the Oracle Universal Installer locally on the destination host. You can also use the Oracle Universal Installer if it already exists on the host. To invoke Oracle Universal Installer, run the runinstaller and setup.exe executables on Unix and Windows respectively from the install directory. You can, of course, invoke the Oracle Universal Installer from a file server. However, bear in mind that the Oracle Universal Installer is a platform-specific tool and has to be of the same platform variant as the installation host.

  • In the Universal Installer's "Source" location, specify the HTTP location for the products.jar file. The Oracle Universal Installer recognizes a Web staging area just like a local, network, or CD-ROM stage. (See Figure 2.)

figure 2

Unattended Installs

Many large organizations use unattended installs via response files in order to achieve standard product selections and configuration. The unattended installation can also be scheduled from an existing Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control job to deploy into multiple destinations at a stipulated time interval when the network is least busy. The unattended installation can be kicked off using: 

runInstaller -silent -responsefile <response file name>
on Unix, and 

setup.exe -silent -responsefile <response file name>
on Windows.

For installing via response files, the following entry needs to be put in the FROM_LOCATION section of the response file. 

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Name: FROM_LOCATION
# Datatype: String
# Description: Complete path of the products.jar.
# Example: FROM_LOCATION = "../stage/products.jar"
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FROM_LOCATION= http://oldsmpweb.us.oracle.com/product/software_dist/doc/Disk1/stage/products.jar

Proxy Support

The proxy support for Oracle Universal Installer has not been officially certified at this point. However, it is technically possible to install across a firewall integrated with a proxy server, using the standard Java directives. In the case of multiple firewalls separating the staging server and the installing host, the address of the "closest" proxy server needs to be provided. It will then forward the request to subsequent levels. For Windows the command would be:

setup.exe -J-Dhttp.proxyHost=130.35.6.1 -Dhttp.proxyPort=3128 -http.nonProxyHosts=*oracle.com|localhost

For Unix, it would be:

runInstaller -J-Dhttp.proxyHost=130.35.6.1 -Dhttp.proxyPort=3128 -http.nonProxyHosts= *oracle.com|localhost

where http.proxyHost is the name or IP address of the proxy server, http.proxyPort is the name of the port, and http.nonProxyHosts specifies the hosts and domains that reside within the firewall and hence do not need proxy.

Certification against specific firewall vendors such as Checkpoint, Symantec, and Watchguard is yet to be performed.

Limitations

  • The install does not support Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Cryptography.

  • The install is not certified against specific firewall vendors.

Other Resources

Oracle Universal Installer Overview
Oracle Universal Installer Concepts Guide

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