SAP - Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing

When you run sapinst and a database is created, it will create the initial initSID.ora profile with the parameter remote_os_authent = true.  At some point in the installation, sapinst restarts Oracle, which then returns an error like

Error message: ORA-32004: obsolete or deprecated parameter(s) specified for RDBMS instance

When you see this, leave the sapinst message up, but edit initSID.ora and remove the line remove_os_authent = true.  Restart Oracle with "shutdown immediate" and "startup nomount" and click "retry" in sapinst.  This will cause its own problems later on, so you will need to add it back and restart Oracle once the database has been created.

Be sure that there are no other "deprecated parameter" messages after you do this.  Any such message will cause sapinst to stop dead in its tracks.  Other deprecated parameters include "user_dump_dest" and "background_dump_dest".