Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Silent upgrade of Oracle Agent to 10.2.0.4

Recently I got a task to upgrade RAC-aware
oracle agents from 10.2.0.3 to 10.2.0.4.

I presumed that installation available on OTN for mass
deployments will do the trick but I failed on that assumption.

Finally I recognized that upgrade should be done with patch
3731593 which is available on Metalink.

Due to security reasons there is only access to command line
on the server and that led me to use silent installation of the
patch. It was not the first time when I used it so I started to
put necessary values to the copy of patchset.rsp file.

Looking through the contents of the file I discovered
with pleasure that there is no entry for ORACLE_HOME_NAME
variable there. It is not a problem to find out it (/etc/oraInst.loc shows
location of oracle inventory and there is ContentsXML/inventory.xml
file there with information about oracle home paths and names)
but I can't see the reason to use it during installation.

Anyway, I made a file for silent installation and executed installer
(stopped agents on each host before it) - got an error

3731593/Disk1$ ./runInstaller -silent responseFile /patch/3731593/Disk1/response/patchagent10204.rsp
...
OUI-10202:No response file is specified for this session.
A silent session requires inputs from a response file or
from the command line. Specify the response file and re-run the installer.


Ok sounds familiar. How about to add "=" after responseFile parameter
Ran it, got an error again

./runInstaller -silent responseFile=/patch/3731593/Disk1/response/patchagent10204.rsp
...
SEVERE:Values for the following variables could not
be obtained from the command line or response file(s):
ORACLE_HOME(OracleHome),
ORACLE_HOME_NAME(OracleHomeName)
Silent install cannot continue.


Great! ORACLE_HOME_NAME had appeared!
And even ORACLE_HOME was not recognized :(

Finally I added those 2 variables to command line
and successfully executed upgrade of oracle agent
(remote installation also was completed without
problems)

./runInstaller -silent responseFile=/patch/3731593/Disk1/response/patchagent10204.rsp
ORACLE_HOME="/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/agent10g"
ORACLE_HOME_NAME="agent10g"

And moreover the installation did not ask to run any root.sh scripts
which saved SA's time :)

After upgrade everything went smoothly - new versions of the agents
had been discovered in Grid Control, files were uploaded and
monitoring had resumed. Lucky me!

And the great news - I got Troubleshooting Oracle Performance book!

What a good day!
Have a good one too!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you so much for these tips. You are one of the few places on the web that consistently has Silent install tips. Its so poorly documented, it usually takes me forever to figure out the quirks. Thanks again!
-Steve

Vlado said...

I also had with ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_HOME_NAME system variables problem when installing BI on AIX. Thanks to this post the installation started successfully.

Regards, Vlado

goryunov said...

I am glad it helped.