Monday, February 04, 2008

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.

8 comments:

Noons said...

just peachy...

soooo easy to install and debug, all this fusion stuff!

I guess that's what "scalable" means to the j2ee brigade...

Anonymous said...

i normally have to send in trace files too. When asked what kind of trace file.

wait.

wait..

wait...

Anonymous said...

ahh the glory of oracle support,

first upload the alert log plus any trace files generated as indicated in the alert log.

wait abit

get request for rda files.

Upload rda files

Wait a bit

wait a bit more

prod oracle support

have case transfered to someone else

wait for them to read the case notes.

get request to upload all alert and trace files from 2 days before the error occured.

Realise trace files requested are no longer available advise support.

Support ask for small test case.

unable to create test case.

Support adives unable to continue if error re-occurs advised to save all trace files from arbitary time before recieving error and submit firstborn son to Larrys evil empire....

Eric Moe said...

I am having about the same success with Oracle support with our upgrade to R12. We cannot get the login screen to come up at all.
send log file...wait...send log file...wait.

Jeff Hunter said...

yes, the R12 upgrade is not very well thought out. I think the initial R12 effort was at installing a fresh R12 and they worry about the upgrade around 12.0.8.

Christopher Gait said...

Jeff,

Could you get in touch with me at chris ]dot] gait ]at] Oracle ]dot] com about this? I'm interested in taking at look at the SR.

Anonymous said...

easy to install

Unknown said...

Are you saying Oracle doesn't support R12 well? Anyone has better experiences with R12 and has implemented succesfully.