Dear Readers,

Hope you are doing well & safe.

Today I will be writing on one of the issue I faced today while applying “GI Release Update 19.9.0.0.201020″(31750108) patch on GI Home of one of servers.

I used opatchauto utility to apply this patch. Following command was run for the same:

$<GI_HOME>/OPatch/opatchauto apply <PATCH DIRECTORY> -oh <GI_HOME>

After waiting for the sometime, I found my command was stuck without any progress. It was not moving further after printing below status information:

 OPatchauto session is initiated at Sat Dec 12 15:23:18 2020
 System initialization log file is /u01/app/19.6.0.0/grid/cfgtoollogs/opatchautodb/systemconfig2020-12-12_03-23-54PM.log.
 Session log file is /u01/app/19.6.0.0/grid/cfgtoollogs/opatchauto/opatchauto2020-12-12_03-24-19PM.log
The id for this session is JKL8
 Executing OPatch prereq operations to verify patch applicability on home /u01/app/19.6.0.0/grid
Patch applicability verified successfully on home /u01/app/19.6.0.0/grid
 Bringing down CRS service on home /u01/app/19.6.0.0/grid
Prepatch operation log file location: /u01/app/oracle/crsdata/test-server-1/crsconfig/hapatch_2020-12-12_03-26-03PM.log
CRS service brought down successfully on home /u01/app/19.6.0.0/grid
 Start applying binary patch on home /u01/app/19.6.0.0/grid
Successfully executed command: /usr/sbin/slibclean 

I checked lot many relevant logfiles associated with this opatchauto session, I found none of were updated with proper information what the session is currently doing.

So after traversing in between multiple directories & files I found following logfile which has information on what the session is waiting for:

/u01/app/19.6.0.0/grid/cfgtoollogs/opatchauto/core/opatch/opatch2020-12-12_15-26-39PM_1.log

Logfile had repeated warnings as given below:

Do you want to proceed? [y|n]
 [Dec 12, 2020 3:28:55 PM] [INFO]    Y (auto-answered by -silent)
 [Dec 12, 2020 3:28:55 PM] [INFO]    User Responded with: Y
 [Dec 12, 2020 3:28:55 PM] [INFO]    OPatch will sleep for few seconds, before re-trying to get the lock…
 [Dec 12, 2020 3:30:55 PM] [INFO]    Unable to lock Central Inventory.  OPatch will attempt to re-lock.
                                     Do you want to proceed? [y|n]
 [Dec 12, 2020 3:30:55 PM] [INFO]    Y (auto-answered by -silent)
 [Dec 12, 2020 3:30:55 PM] [INFO]    User Responded with: Y
 [Dec 12, 2020 3:30:55 PM] [INFO]    OPatch will sleep for few seconds, before re-trying to get the lock…
 [Dec 12, 2020 3:32:55 PM] [INFO]    Unable to lock Central Inventory.  OPatch will attempt to re-lock.

I found the culprit. Patching session was unable to lock central inventory. After checking I found locks directory had incorrect ownership. After changing its ownership back to Oracle user, patching session moved further.

Following commands were used to fix the issue:

 As a root user:
 cd <oraInventory location>
 chown -R oracle:oinstall locks

Patching was successfully completed in 35 Minutes.

Hope u will find this post very useful.

Cheers

Regards,
Adityanath