HOW TO : Dowload content from Oracle Metalink (Support) using wget

The usual process for a DBA to download files from Oracle Metalink (support) site is

• Login to Metalink from his/her workstation
• Download the file
• Upload the file to the database server
• Use the file

Say your database is in a data center and your workstation doesn’t have high speed connectivity to the data center, you can use the following trick to download content to a l[u]inux server in the data center that has Internet connectivity (and hopefully it is not your database server 🙂 ).

• Log into Metalink from your workstation
• Grab the link to the file/content you want to download (for example, we recently tried to download clusterware for Oracle 11G, and the link was http://download.oracle.com/otn/linux/oracle11g/linux.x64_11gR1_clusterware.zip)
• Log into a server in your data center (it should have connectivity to the Internet and also to your database server)
• Download the file using wget

[bash]wget http://download.oracle.com/otn/linux/oracle11g/linux.x64_11gR2_clusterware.zip –user ORACLE_ID –password ORACLE_ID_PASSWORD[/bash]

• Replace the link with the link to your content and use your Oracle ID and password.

• The file downloaded will have a strange name since wget  appends the sessionID to the end of the file. In the example I used above, the name of the file was “linux.x64_11gR2_clusterware.zip\?e\=1297470492\&h\=a66b265cc967a68c611052cb8e54356f“
• Rename the file and strip off the unnecessary data in the name using mv