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):
- /etc/vservers/.defaults/apps/vprocunhide/files
- /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.
