Patchset 10.2.0.5 installation woes on Windows (2k)
Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2010 12:43:21 +0200
Message-ID: <878w4htmeu.fsf_at_prometeus.nothing.none>
Hello out there,
this weekend I installed patchset 10.2.0.5 on our production system anfter having patched the development system on thursday. I want to point out some of the pitfalls i came upon. Maybe this helps others to circumvent them.
Most of them are most likely mentioned in the release notes but real programmers don't read release notes. ;-)
The starting situation was an Oracle 10.2.0.4 (SE1) installation on an almost fully patched Windows 2000 Server. There were almost none of the quarterly security patches (aka CPU) applied.
The installation of the patchset itself ran quite smoothly, except that I (as almost always) forgot to stop the Distributed Transaction Manager service which locked some files the patchset tried to update. Maybe Oracle should point that out in the installation instructions. (When they did, I didn't find it ;-)
But then came dbua! On the first system I started it from the start menu. I chose the appropriate instance and started the upgrade. After a while, it opened a messagebox in the background which did not appear even when I changed the application via Alt-Tab. I had to explicitly select the Java symbol in the task switcher. This is a Java issue (maybe only on W2k) but I lost some time waiting for something to happen.
After a while I got messages the the Windows event log filled up. Obviously, dbua filled up the application event log with audit messages. I had to increase the size of the event log an clear it frequently. Totally, these messages sum up to about 100MB. Another system on Windows 2003 Server did not show this behavior though. This seems to be a W2k only issue.
Later on, dbua tried to upgrade Enterprise Manager dbconsole and failed
because it did not recognize the domain part of the hostname and
complained about a hostname longer than 32 characters. I had to manually
configure dbconsole using dbca later.
To prevent this, I set the environment variable ORACLE_HOSTNAME before
the subsequent runs of dbua.
The last issue is a change in Oracle's handling of password protected roles that I did not expect to happen in a patchset. After installing patchset 10.2.0.5 password protected roles cannot made default (they actually can, but aren't enabled at login). Luckily, I had a script at hand from my tests with Oracle 11g a few months ago. Basically I create a new role without a password and copy the grants over to that. I did not expect such a fundamental change in behavior happen in a patchset that changes the fourth digit in the version. (Remember, real programmers don't read release notes ;-)
Hope that helps others to circumvent these pitfalls, Lothar
-- Lothar Armbrüster | lothar.armbruester_at_t-online.de Hauptstr. 26 | 65346 Eltville |Received on Sun Aug 08 2010 - 05:43:21 CDT