I based this blog post on information that I learned from this Oracle Support document:
Runinstaller And Emctl Do Not Work After Upgrading HP-UX 11.31 To 11.31 Update3 (Sep 2008) (Doc ID 780102.1)
My situation was slightly different from what Oracle’s note describes so I thought it would be helpful to document what I found.
In my case I am cloning an Oracle 10.2.0.3 home on to a fully patched HP-UX 11.31 server. I have used this same clone process on Oracle 11.1, 11.2, and 12.1 Oracle Homes with no issues. The symptom is that the 10.2 clone process just hangs with no helpful messages.
I searched Oracle’s support site and the web for issues with 10.2 cloning and could not find anything that matched my symptoms. I then decided to give up on cloning and try to install the base 10.2.0.1 binaries and then patch to match the home that I was trying to clone. The 10.2.0.1 install also hung. But, I know that the 10.2.0.1 install works since we have used it on many other similar systems. But, they were on HP-UX 11.23 and not the fully patched HP-UX 11.31. So, I searched for installer issues on 11.31 and 10.2 and found the Oracle document listed above.
Evidently there is some bug with the JDK that Oracle included in 10.2 so that it does not work with HP-UX 11.31 with the current patches. A later version of Java resolves the issue.
Now that I understood the issue I decided to go back to the clone and try to apply the recommendations from the Oracle note, even though it doesn’t mention cloning.
The Oracle note suggests adding the –jreLoc /opt/java1.4 option to the runInstaller command line. The only catch is that my HP system did not have /opt/java1.4. The oldest java we have installed is in /opt/java1.5. So, I tried the clone with the -jreLoc /opt/java1.5 option and it got almost to the end of the clone before it hung doing some emctl step. Then I realized that I needed to follow the steps in the Oracle note to rename the Oracle Home’s jdk directory and set up a link to the Java1.5 directory. So, I did these steps to point to the correct jdk directory:
cd $ORACLE_HOME
mv jdk jdk.orig
ln -s /opt/java1.5 jdk
Then I ran the clone with this command line:
$ORACLE_HOME/oui/bin/runInstaller -jreLoc /opt/java1.5 -clone -silent ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_HOME ORACLE_BASE=$ORACLE_BASE ORACLE_HOME_NAME=$ORACLE_HOME_NAME
Success!
It wasn’t that hard to apply the note to the clone situation but I thought it was worth blogging it. If someone googles runInstaller clone hang 10.2 11.31 and needs the solution they will find it.
Of course, I may be the only person in the world cloning a 10.2 Oracle Home on an HP-UX Itanium 11.31 system, but it’s here if someone needs it.
Bobby
