RE: OS Patches

From: Matthew Zito <mzito_at_gridapp.com>
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:25:34 -0500
Message-ID: <C0A5E31718FC064A91E9FD7BE2F081B1029CF4D8_at_exchange.gridapp.com>

Up2date -u is definitely not the way to upgrade your linux machines. You should move to phased releases for your database boxes - 4.7, 4.8, 5.3, etc.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Li Li Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 3:05 PM To: pnedeljkovich_at_georgianc.on.ca
Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: OS Patches

we had an incident last month when patching one of the RAC nodes (RHEL 4.6). when one of our engineers was runing "up2date -u", the server automatically rebooted on its own to kernel panic. We have been working with redhat support with no luck. We ended up having to drop that node out of the cluster because it prevents us from doing RMAN clone due to bug 8367313.

I am now very nervous about Redhat patching. My understanding is Redhat releases RPM patches on a daily basis and no matter how you test the patches in your non-production, you might get a new RPM fix when you patch your production on a later date. In our case, we tested it in our non-production boxes with no issue, but it caused problem when patching production boxes.

I am wondering how you all handle OS patches? one thing I can think of is to only patch to a Redhat native release, ie, only patch to 4.7, 4.8 etc, instead of running "up2date -u".

Thanks,
-Li

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 7:45 AM, Peter Nedeljkovich <pnedeljkovich_at_georgianc.on.ca> wrote:
> We've got a 4 node RAC 11gR1 on Linux 4.7 with ASM. We need to bring
the
> latest patches into the OS and I was wondering what the best practice
would
> be. I realize that we could do a rolling patch if we were patching CRS
or
> the databases but can that be done for the OS? Would it be better
(Safer?)
> to shutdown the whole RAC and do the OS patch to one node at a time or
can
> we leave 3 nodes up while patching one?
>
>
>
>
>
> Peter Nedeljkovich
>
> DBA
>
> Georgian College
>
> 705-728-1968 Ext. 1217
>
>

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Received on Tue Feb 16 2010 - 14:25:34 CST