10gR2 has no permission for "other" unix user

Question

We installed 10gR2 on RHEL3, created a database. As user "oracle", we are able to connect to the database. As any other user, we are not able to get to sqlplus. The environment variables are fine for the user.
When checked, we found that $ORACLE_HOME has 740 permission, and many directories/files underneath have the same permission. So, the "other" user is not able to get to the executable, or even it does, it can't execute it.
Anyone seen this from 10gR2 install on Linux? Any good work around?
I have not seen this from 10gR1.

Answer 1

Hi.
I have not tried to install 10gR2 yet, so I'll do a guess, ok? Maybe Oracle is doing this to get a more secure environment.
You asked for a workaround. Well, I have a procedure I follow in Oracle installations, and do not consider it to be a workaround. Anyway, it may be helpful for you.
On many of my installations, I've changed umask for "oracle" account to 0027, in order to get files created with 0640 and directories with 0750 permisssion flags. Doing this is a security issue: you prevents, on purpose, users from others groups even to access oracle directories and files.
Moreover, I use to create an "orauser" group, and make "oracle" acount use this group as a secondary group . On Linux, you may achieve this by typing:
groupadd orauser # Create a new group called "orauser"
gpasswd -a oracle orauser # Add user "oracle" to group "orauser"
id oracle # Just check the oracle account
Then, you may add any user you need to "orauser" group as well. In order to get all environment variables to be correctly set, I create a "oraenv.sh" shell script, to be run for all users on logon. The code bellow may be added on /etc/profile, or on a new shell script on /etc/profile.d (this directory is present on some Unix/Linux flavours):
# Define location for oraenv.sh shell script.
oraenvScript=/oracle/local/bin/oraenv.sh
# Check if user belongs to groups: dba, oinstall, oper, orauser
if [ `id | egrep '(dba)|(oinstall)|(oper)|(orauser)' | wc -w` -gt 0 ]
then
# Check if oraenv.sh file exists
if [ -f $oraenvScript ]
then
# Source Oracle environment variables from oraenv.sh
. $oraenvScript
fi
fi
Hope this help.
Best regards,
Danilo