MacLochlainns Weblog

Michael McLaughlin's Technical Blog

Site Admin

Fedora 30 Missing Library

without comments

Having run into an obsolete library issue installing Oracle Database 18c XE on Fedora, Version 30, I opted to revert my student image to Oracle Database 11g XE. The installation went without issue but when I tried to log into SQL*Plus as the oracle user, I got the following error message:

sqlplus: error while loading shared libraries: libnsl.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The libnsl.so.1 library is no longer installed as part of the distribution for Fedora 28 forward but you can install it with the yum tool, like:

yum install -y libnsl

If you attempted to run the oracle-xe utility to configure the database prior to adding this library, it fails to provision the instance without a message. You won’t get the message until you manually try to connect as the sysdba privileged user. At that point, you’ll determine the instance wasn’t provisioned.

You can see that the installation failed when the oracle-xe utility fails to print the following lines to the console after the options are entered:

Starting Oracle Net Listener...Done
Configuring database...Done
Starting Oracle Database 11g Express Edition instance...Done
Installation completed successfully.

After installing the missing library, the oracle-xe utility works correctly. Alas, it looks like I’ll never bother to sort the Oracle Database 18c XE issues because after this version of the image we are moving the courses to a PostgreSQL database. PostgreSQL offers the smaller footprint that supports the core learning objectives of the courses.

As always, I hope this helps those looking for a solution.

Written by maclochlainn

August 11th, 2019 at 9:29 pm