Where to install Oracle in Solaris. Under users home?

[David Rocks]

Hi,
Just a simple question. I have just got my first Solaris box to install our java/oracle/apache/tomcat software on.
When i try to install oracle it stops me doing it as root. But when i create a user it wants to install the software under the users home. Is this normal pratice? Would it not be better to install it under a directory at root creating a directory that could be read by other users? Or should i create an oracle user and put my oracle install direcly under that with oracle admin user group. I just don't know what standard unix architecture is?
Any help would be greatly appreciated
david

[Tim Holloway]

It's not uncommon for servers and daemons to install under a user account rather than as root. This prevents them from being abused by the Bad Guys (or at least reduces opportunities).
It's not a problem for something like a DBMS, because the actual communication between clients and the DB server is going on via pipes or other channels, so the only cases where a user would be affected by the access rights of the DBMS account are things like example files (which should be 744) and shared libraries (755).

[Michael Ernest]

There are lots of opinions about the "best place" to put these products. You can certainly modify /etc/passwd later on so the "orauser" account or whatever it's called will go where you like.
From an aesthetic standpoint, I would prefer to install the oracle binaries in /opt, but keep the orauser account in /export/home. Unless oracle's doing something really bizarre these days, it does not install its binaries or database structure under orauser.