R12 Upgrade Fun & Games

So I've been toying around with an Oracle R12 upgrade lately. The first attempt went miserably wrong with all sorts of issues when I applied RUP3.

Then I decided that upgrading my middle-tier to Linux x86_64 sounded like a good idea. Except it wasn't. You see, first off 11.5.9 isn't supported on x86_64, so you can't add a node to your existing 11.5.9 instance. And you can't install an R12.0 base on x86_64 and then upgrade your 11.5.9 db, because that too is not supported. I ended up collapsing my two-tier environment to a single tier so I can upgrade to R12 and then add an R12 node that runs x86_64 later on. That, I double checked, is supported.

I performed the 11.5.9 to R12.0.0 upgrade again on my test system and applied the RUP4. Surprisingly, I only encountered about four problems. Two of the problems were not really problems because I wasn't running those modules and two problems that I researched on Metalink and quickly resolved.

When I brought the whole thing up (on a single tier), all the middle-tier services came up quite fine. Yes, I was surprised too.

The first time I tried to login is when my problems started. The ominous "Login failed. Please verify your login information or contact the system administrator" message comes up. Hey, I am the system administrator, WTF I am supposed to do from here? No errors, no messages, no nothing.

No problem, I'll just go to my standard diagnostic tests that I used in 11.5.9 to see where my problem is. Wait, there's no FND_WEB.Ping anymore. Nor is there any isItWorking servlets.

Finally, I find http://hostname/OA_HTML/jsp/fnd/aolj_conn_test.jsp and run through the tests. Surprisingly, everything but the AOL/J connection test works.

"Aha, I'll provide that information to Oracle Support and they'll be able to tell me where to look right away.", I thought to myself.

"Please upgrade to the latest RUP" was their response.

Me: "Errr, I am on RUP4."

Them: "Please rerun autoconfig."

Me. "Errr, done, but that doesn't solve my problem. Besides, my AOL/J connection test doesn't work. What does AOL/J do and why would it fail with this error?"

Wait.

Wait.

Wait.

Me: "Um, this is kind of urgent. When I try to login to the forms server directly I get 'APP-FND-01542: This Applications Server is not authorized to access this database.'"


Wait.

Wait.

Me: "I found that if I change my s_appserverid_authentication to OFF in the context file I get a different error logging into the forms server. Now I'm getting 'Error: validateLogin returned false; failed to login as XXX, please try again'"

Wait.

Wait.

Me: "Is anyone looking at this TAR?"

Them: "Sorry for the delay, I am looking at your log files"

Wait.

Wait.

...to be continued.