PATCHING PROBLEMS - URGENT HELP NEEDED

[patrick coutinho]

Dear friends,

I have just prepared an Unix B.11.11 rp7410 server for our Oracle financials 11i upgrade.

The last things i was doing was applying patches to this server. Found that the GOLDQPK11i for Dec 2003 was available on the net. Could not download the whole things via tar or gzip even though i tried for hours. So i finally downloaded the depot file and the dependant patches individually.

the dependant patches installed fine. The depot too registered fine, BUT when i tried to install the contained products namely the GOLDApps11i and GOLDBASE11i , i faced a problem. The installation was suspended with the message that some subsets were missing from the depot. On telephone advice from our local HP agent i aborted the install and then tried to use SWREMOVE to remove the Bundle. but that did not work. Before i tried this i had successfully removed the dependant patch.

The problem was with the GOLDQPK11 bundle for which installation failed. The HP engineer advised me to use swremove and uncheck all options for checking dependencies. This worked fine for the product GOLDQPKApps11i, but when i tried this with GOLDBASE11i, it just does not work, brings up a blank screen which says 'Check/Uncheck depdndant products@ and goes no further. The product area of the screen too does no display any product choices.

Now i am in a real jam because this machine is due for production. What i want to do is remove the Dec 2003 GOLDQPK11i bundle and install and install the JUNE 2003 GOLDQPK11i bundle for which i have the media.

How can i salvage my situation. I don't want to have to rebuild this machine as i have been working on it for several days. I am new to HP UX and am nervous about patch and other dependencies that may exist. How do i remove the Bundle and start afresh with installing the June 2003 bundle.

Please please help me. thanks in advance.

rgds

patrick

[Pete Randall]

Patrick,

There may be a way around this but I don't know what it is. If I was in this situation, I would re-install. Now that you've been through it once and documented all you need to do, you should be able to do it in half a day at most. Then install the June bundle from media. You can download and install the December bundle later.

I have a question, though: why is there this kind of deadline for putting a server into production? I normally allow months to bring a server up, migrate data, test, adjust, test some more, etc, etc, etc.

Good luck,


Pete

[patrick coutinho]

Thanks very much Pete. i think i sould be able to setup the box pretty quick. I am sorry. I did not mean production. What i wanted to say was that our consultants were to start working on building the production server from the test server very soon.

Thanks once again. I hope someone may help me with some tips.

rgds

pat

[RAC_1]

Try removing with following options.
autoselect_dependents=false
enforce_dependencies=true

swremove -x autoselect_dependents=false -x enforce_dependencies=false "Product"

But it is better to reinstall.

[Dave Hutton]

I would also suggest just reinstalling. A place I used to work, we had a guy who rm -rfed a directory. He was wondering why it was taking so long. It turned out he was in the wrong directory and was killing system files.
For some reason this guy had tar files of a bunch of the file systems and untarred them back into place. Needless to say that server went into production without us knowning what he did. It never did work right, and was too late to go back and correct it. In this case it was a Sun server, so we all didn't have much experience with it and just let it gimp by.

So I guess from this lesson I learned to put off a server going anywhere if I know its not close to perfect.

Dave

[patrick coutinho]

thanks everyone. i think you'll are right. I will reinstall.

rgds

pat

[Angus Crome]

One suggestion.

Make a recovery tape of this system as soon as you get it to a usable state. That way if this happens again, it will only take about 1 hour to recover it from tape.

Once you get the system where you think it is ready, make another one. That way you are protected from this situation re-occurring.