Patching issue in Grid Control and the FIX

Oracle Support recently advised us to apply a number of patches to our Grid Control 

installation, as per a Metalink Note 427577.1 (OMS Patches required for setting up 

Provisioning and Patching in 10.2.0.3 GC / 10.2.0.4 GC).  The main purpose was to 

improve the Provisioning and Patching facilities in Grid Control.

However, we had an issue with applying one particular patch 7214697 from this list. 

This was giving an error towards the end in the opatch apply. The error occurred 

when PARdeploying prereqs.par :

C:\OracleHomes\oms10g\bin\PARDeploy -action deploy -parFile 

C:\OracleHomes\oms10g\sysman\prov\paf\prereqs.par

0 [main] DEBUG oracle.sysman.eml.swlib.DBEntity - SWLIB getRepositoryFormatForRevision

...

...

78 [main] DEBUG oracle.sysman.eml.swlib.DBEntity - SWLIB getDocuments

78 [main] DEBUG oracle.sysman.eml.swlib.DBEntity - SWLIB getRepositoryFormatForParameters

125 [main] DEBUG oracle.sysman.eml.swlib.DBEntity - SWLIB error=An entity with

the specified name already exists

Even though there was an error during the patch application, this patch showed up in the 

"opatch lsinventory". But then, when Grid Control was started, we were not even 

able to enter the patching screen.  As soon as we went to the "Deployments" tab 

and clicked on "Patching through Deployment Procedures", we got :

"Internal Error has occured. Check the log file for details."

We got exactly the same error when we clicked on "Deployment Procedures",

"Patch Procedures" etc.

The patch, even when rollbacked, failed with exactly the same error.

It disappeared from the inventory, but the internal error was still present

in the patching screens in Grid Control.

Finally, the fix to this issue turned out to be a very simple one:

cd %OMS_ORACLE_HOME%\patches\p7214697_10204_GENERIC\7214697\custom\scripts 

Edit post.bat and change the line: 

%ORACLE_HOME%\bin\PARDeploy -action deploy -parFile %ORACLE_HOME%\sysman\prov\paf\prereqs.par 

to 

%ORACLE_HOME%\bin\PARDeploy -action -force deploy -parFile %ORACLE_HOME%\sysman\prov\paf\prereqs.par

 

This prevents the error when applying the patch, by forcing the PARDeploy of prereqs.par. 

After the patch is successfully applied without any errors, the Grid Control patch deployment procedures work ok.

By the way this seems to be a Windows Grid Control issue.