You have files on an External USB drive that you want to connect to Exadata Compute node to copy them over to the server file system. This can be done for several reasons such as Database Migration.



In this article I will demonstrate step by step how to mount an Exadata USB drive to Exadata Compute node.

Steps to mount External USB on Exadata Compute node

• Connect the External USB drive to Exadata Compute node. This can be done easily by Data Center Engineer who has access to Data Center and Exadata Rack.

• Once the USB is connected, Verify you can see it on the Exadata Compute node by running the following command.

[root@dm01db01 ~]# multipath -l
33e41384658514e52 dm-5 Seagate,Expansion Desk
size=3.6T features=’0′ hwhandler=’0′ wp=rw
`-+- policy=’round-robin 0′ prio=0 status=active
  `- 7:0:0:0 sdb 8:16 active undef unknown

You can also use “fdisk -l” command to list the connected USB.

[root@dm01db01 ~]# fsdisk -l
….
                         Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/mapper/33e41384658514e52p1               1      267350  2147483647+  ee  GPT
Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.

[root@dm01db01 ~]# ls -l /dev/mapper/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       7 Apr 24 18:53 33e41384658514e52 -> ../dm-5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       7 Apr 24 18:53 33e41384658514e52p1 -> ../dm-6
crw-rw—- 1 root root 10, 236 Apr 22 14:23 control
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       7 Apr 24 18:53 VGExaDb-LVDbOra1 -> ../dm-3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       7 Apr 24 18:53 VGExaDb-LVDbSwap1 -> ../dm-2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       7 Apr 24 18:53 VGExaDb-LVDbSys1 -> ../dm-0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       7 Apr 24 18:53 VGExaDb-LVDbSys2 -> ../dm-1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       7 Apr 24 18:53 VGExaDb-LVDoNotRemoveOrUse -> ../dm-4

• Create a mount point

[root@dm01db01 mnt]# mkdir -p /mnt/dbmigration

• Verify the file system type for mounting purpose. Here the it is ext4

[root@dm01db01 mnt]# mount -l
/dev/mapper/VGExaDb-LVDbSys1 on / type ext4 (rw) [DBSYS]
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,size=775461m)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext4 (rw,nodev) [BOOT]
/dev/mapper/VGExaDb-LVDbOra1 on /u01 type ext4 (rw,nodev) [DBORA]
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
nfsd on /proc/fs/nfsd type nfsd (rw)

• Mount the External USB on the local mount point created.

[root@dm01db01 ~]# mount -t ext4 /dev/mapper/33e41384658514e52p1 /mnt/dbmigration

• Verify the UBS is mounted successfully

[root@dm01db01 ~]# df -h /mnt/dbmigration
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/33e41384658514e52p1
                      2.0T   99G  1.8T   6% /mnt/dbmigration

• Change directory permissions and ownership to Oracle

[root@dm01db01 ~]# chown oracle:oinstall -R /mnt/dbmigration

[root@dm01db01 ~]# chmod 775 -R /mnt/dbmigration

• Verify the permissions and ownership

[root@dm01db01 ~]# ls -ld /mnt/dbmigration
drwxrwxr-x 4 oracle oinstall 4096 Apr 25 09:49 /mnt/dbmigration

• Verify that that you can access and list the contents from USB.

[root@dm01db01 ~]# cd /mnt/dbmigration

[root@dm01db01 dbmigration]# ls -ltr
total 103004260
-rw-r—– 1 500 500 6786600960 Apr 25 11:25 expdp_full.dmp
-rw-r—– 1 500 500 7231434752 Apr 25 11:25 expdp_schema.dmp
-rw-r–r– 1 500 500     129609 Apr 25 11:30 expdp_schemas.log


Conclusion

In this article we have learned how to mount an External USB drive on Exadata Compute node.