As part of our initiative to provide quality content to our community, Quest has teamed up with several PeopleSoft thought leaders who will be sharing their knowledge across our blogs. This week, Dan Iverson, PeopleSoft Administrator at psadmin.io writes about building PeopleSoft Images with DPKs on Linux.

Dan Iverson, Quest Guest Blogger | Blog content sourced from psadmin.io

As we have discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this discussion, Oracle is now shipping PeopleSoft Images with 8.55 and Deployment Kits(DPKs). Dan and I have talked quite a bit about our experiences using these DPKs with VirtualBox and NativeOS installments on Windows, so naturally Linux is up next. This is the OS that I spend most of my time in, so I have been excited to give it a try.

To get started, I took another read through the PeopleSoft Deployment Packages for Update Images Installation guide. Again, this can be found under Installation Documentation on the PUM Home Page. In this document it clearly states that Oracle Linux is supported for this installation. I normally don’t run Oracle Linux, so I was curious if it would work on other flavors. I gave it a try on both SuSE and Ubuntu without success. The bootstrap script basically fails right away, and I didn’t dig any further. So, I spun up a fresh lab install of Oracle Linux 7.2 and used that instead.

As with the other styles of DPK, the first step after you download the Linux .zip files is to extract the first file. Once extracted, you will find a setup directory which contains the bootstrap script psft-dpk-setup.sh. Before running this script, you will need to enable execution by running sudo chmod x psft-dpk-setup.sh. After that, execute the bootstrap script and you are off and running.

I ran into a few issues with the installation, all related to dependencies (Update: More info here). I ended up having to install all these packages to get past the issues:

sudo yum install libc.so.6 libgcc_s.so.1 libselinux.so.1 libxml2.so.2 libcrypto.so.10 libdb-5.3.so libffi.so.6 libgdbm.so.4 libncurses.so.5 libncursesw.so.5 libreadline.so.6 libssl.so.10 libtinfo.so.5 ruby rubygem oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall

After getting these installed, it was time to give it another try. Running the bootstrap script again was not needed for this. Instead, I simply ran puppet apply site.pp which needed to be executed from the /etc/puppet/manifests directory. This time everything ran to success.

I chose the default initialization process, but you may want to make a few changes in your deployment. The changes you are most likely to make are related to security. By default the DPK will create 4 local user accounts: psadm1, psadm2, psadm3 and oracle2. This may not fit in with your security polices, so changing this could be crucial. In the installation guide, search for Task 6-1, which will walk you through the changes needed in your psft_customization.yaml file. If you do choose the defaults, then take a look at Task 7-1. This will cover all the default installation directories, as well as the default users and how they are used.

As always, if you ran into any other issues or have other observations related to the Linux NativeOS install, please let us know about it in the comments below!

Interested in learning more? psadmin.io offers a free “Deployment Package Quickstart” online course that can be found here.