PSU installation issues - example on AIX

Here short report from today's problems with a PSU installation. It consists of 3 commands actually. Firstly I run usually

opatch prereq CheckConflictAgainstOHWithDetail -phBaseDir ./

to find any problems opatch is able to figure out without running the patch application. The next step assuming all is ok is to run patch application and quite frequently update of database dictionaries

opatch apply
# then within the SQL*Plus run the patched database and call e.g.
@?/rdbms/admin/catbundle.sql psu apply

OPatch can not find patch files

Opatch failed with an error code 73 (which is quite generic). It provided some details presented below:

Failed to load the patch object. Possible causes are: The specified path is not an interim Patch shiphome Meta-data files are missing from the patch area Patch location = /oracle/dist/17082367 Details = PatchObject constructor: Input file "/oracle/dist/17082367/etc/config/actions" or "/oracle/dist/17082367/etc/config/inventory" does not exist. ApplySession failed: PatchObject constructor: Input file "/oracle/dist/17082367/etc/config/actions" or "/oracle/dist/17082367/etc/config/inventory" does not exist. System intact, OPatch will not attempt to restore the system

The reason for this problem is the following. The patch 17082367 is in fact a PSU, so all the patches' files and structures are placed in subfolders, while the opatch looks for them in the parent directory. The solution in my case was to download a newer OPatch version.

OPatch can not copy a library file (AIX)

Another problem arouse with a message:

Copy failed from '/oracle/dist/17082367/13696224/files/lib/libnnz11.so' to '$ORACLE_HOME/lib/libnnz11.so'...

Here important thing is this is the AIX operating system. And frequent thing on AIX is libraries are somewhat locked when loaded in memory. The solution here is to run slibclean as root.

There is too less storage space

It is quite important to check the available storage volume. Fortunately the version of OPatch I used checked that for me. The solution was to clean up to make something like ~500G of free space.

Warnings (AIX)

Common thing on AIX when installing some patches is to get a number of warnings about warnings e.g.

OPatch found the word "warning" in the stderr of the make command. Please look at this stderr. You can re-run this make command. Stderr output: ld: 0711-773 WARNING: Object /oracle/app/11.2.0.2/lib//libgeneric11.a[sdbgrfu.o], imported symbol timezone Symbol was expected to be local. Extra instructions are being generated to reference the symbol.

We ignore them actually.