8 Troubleshooting OPatch

This chapter describes common problems with patching and troubleshooting with OPatch. The following sections are discussed:

8.1 Debugging: Enable Logging and Tracing

Logging and tracing is a common aid for debugging. OPatch maintains logs for all apply, rollback, and lsinventory operations. The log files are located at the following directory:

<ORACLE_HOME>/cfgtoollogs/opatch

Each log file is tagged with the timestamp of the operation. Log files are named as opatch_<date mm-dd-yyyy>_<time hh-mm-ss>.log.

Note:

A new log file is created each time OPatch is executed.

For example, if a log file is created on May 17th, 2013 at 11.55 PM, it will be named as follows:

opatch_05-17-2013_23-55-00.log

Note:

You can set OPatch to debug mode by setting the environment variable OPATCH_DEBUG to TRUE.

OPatch also maintains an index of the commands executed with OPatch and the log files associated with it in the opatch_history.txt file located in the <ORACLE_HOME>/cfgtoollogs/opatch directory. A sample of the history.txt file is as follows:

Date & Time : Tue Apr 26 23:00:55 PDT 2013
Oracle Home : /private/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/
OPatch Ver. : 12.1.0.1.2
Current Dir : /scratch/oui/OPatch
Command     : lsinventory
Log File    : 
/private/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/cfgtoollogs/opatch/opatch-2013_Apr_26_23-00-55-PDT_Tue.log

8.2 References

This section to contain a list of other documentation that may provide support. The main link will point to the "Master Note for OPatch" (Doc ID 293369.1) in MOS.

Patch Set FAQ: See Patchset FAQ (Doc ID 552777.1) for a complete summary of patchset FAQs. This document is available in My Oracle Support.

Information Center: Patching and Maintaining Oracle Database Server/Client Installations (Doc ID 1351428.1 )

8.3 Products and Patch Types Not Supported by OPatch

Oracle now offers a wide range of products, including hardware and operating systems. However, patches required by some products are not currently supported by OPatch.

Note:

If the Oracle product you install (such as Oracle Database or Fusion Middleware) creates an Oracle home directory, then OPatch is provided as part of that installation.

Typically, the types of Oracle products not supported by OPatch include:

  • Hardware (for example, firmware updates for Sun servers).

  • Operating system (for example, kernel patch updates for Oracle Linux or Oracle Solaris.)

  • Java (for example, patch updates for JRE, JDK)

  • Software products that do not create an Oracle home directory (for example, Oracle OpenOffice)