[Spacewalk-list] US7ASCII UTF8 puzzle

[Jan Hutař]

On 2016-03-09 22:06 +0000, fred dussault wrote:
>   Hi Folks,
>   I have currently a CentOS  6.7 box running spacewalk 1.9 server  I'm in
>   the middle of upgrading.  I got through to the spacewalk-setup
>   --disconnected --external-oracle --upgrade part,
>   and it replied like this.
>   Database is using an invalid (non-UTF8) character set:
>   (NLS_CHARACTERSET = US7ASCII)
>   The database server is an external oracle 10G box.
>   Now,  is this a new requirement?  I did the original install a couple
>   of years ago, and it's been working perfectly fine from what I can
>   tell.  is it possible that the initial install was done on a US7ASCII
>   encoded database? Is there any reason why the initial install
>   succeeded?  My DBA is telling me that the server has always been so
>   encoded.
>     My server is half way upgraded.  so my question is this:  Is there a
>   way to legitimately use a US7ASCII encoded server?   My issue is that
>   my DBA's for some reason don't want to migrate the database.  And
>   getting a server that will do UTF8 seems to be a large production.  Any
>   thoughts would be appreciated because right now, my rpm's are updated,
>   the schema has been upgraded, and I'm in sort of a holding pattern.  I
>   can provide any information regarding the spacewalk installation, and a
>   little bit regarding the database back end.  I do have sqlplus access.
>   Thank you very much in advance.

Have not found Spacewalk docs regarding this, but Satellite requires it:

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Satellite/5.7/html-single/Installation_Guide/index.html#Oracle_Database_Requirements

I do not know Oracle, but IMO it would be best to switch your DB (or its
temporary copy) to UTF8 and use that for upgrade.

Regards,
Jan



-- 
Jan Hutar     Systems Management QA
jhutar at redhat.com     Red Hat, Inc.