Posts in category vserver

Unhiding custom entries in /proc in vservers

I use vservers very often. They are easy to maintain and to deploy, and allow clean environments for servers with different purposes, avoiding the need to invest money on hardware resources.

I recently installed Oracle on a vserver, and got some errors from the Enterprise Manager application saying:

java.lang.Exception: Cannot read /proc/partitions

I noticed that such file was not unhidden by vprocunhide script. Such script uses two configuration files (in given order):

  1. /etc/vservers/.defaults/apps/vprocunhide/files
  2. /usr/lib/util-vserver/defaults/vprocunhide-files

The format is simple: each line points to a file in /proc to unhide. You can actually hide them, prepending a - character. Refer to the actual source code for /usr/lib/util-vserver/vprocunhide to get the full options and syntax.

In our context, we just need to 

mkdir -p /etc/vservers/.defaults/apps/vprocunhide/
echo "+/proc/partitions" >> /etc/vservers/.defaults/apps/vprocunhide/files

The Oracle problem, however, persists. It now says java.lang.Exception: Unknown format in /proc/partitions, but it seems to be independent of hosting it inside a vserver. Probably some of the reasons why Oracle is selective regarding Linux kernels and distributions are issues like this.