Cloning ORACLE_HOMEs should be quite well known by now.
Still sometimes there are some glitchs to take care of.
In this case I cloned an existing ORACLE_HOME (dbhome_1) to a new one (dbhome_2) so I can apply a patch and reduce the downtime to <switching ORACLE_HOME> plus <running datapatch>.
Running the runInstaller was straight forward:
./runInstaller -silent -attachHome -invPtrLoc /var/opt/oracle/oraInst.loc \
ORACLE_HOME="/path_to/oracle/product/18.0.0/dbhome_2" \
ORACLE_HOME_NAME="OraDB18Home2" CLUSTER_NODES="{MY_NODE}" -local
But when I tried to start the instance (in an Oracle Restart configuration) a strange error occured:
srvctl start database -db MY_DATABASE
PRCR-1079 : Failed to start resource ora.MY_DATABASE.db CRS-5017: The resource action "ora.MY_DATABASE.db start" encountered the following error: ORA-12777: A non-continuable error encountered. Check the error stack for additional information [ksm_check_ob_paths:1], [ORACLE_BASE], [], []. ORA-08275: Environment variable unset . For details refer to "(:CLSN00107:)" in "/ORACLE_BASE/diag/crs/MY_NODE/crs/trace/ohasd_oraagent_oracle.trc".
CRS-2674: Start of 'ora.MY_DATABASE.db' on 'rznjvh175' failed
and the tracefile only contains lines of limited help:
2019-12-03 10:37:17.014 : USRTHRD:748464: {0:6:2} Thread:ASM DedicatedThread AsmCommonAgent::DedicatedThread::run 220 isRemoteListenSet=0
2019-12-03 10:37:17.651 :CLSDYNAM:51523: [ora.MYDATABASE.db]{0:0:36611} [start] ORA-12777: A non-continuable error encountered. Check the error stack for additional information [ksm_check_ob_paths:1], [ORACLE_BASE], [], [].
ORA-08275: Environment variable unset
With no real luck at googling or searching MOS I had a lucky punch on
orabase command returns no value instead of ORACLE_BASE value. (Doc ID 2225573.1)
So I decided to edit the file /path_to/oracle/product/18.0.0/dbhome_2/install/orabasetab
to
/path_to/oracle/product/18.0.0/dbhome_2:/path_to/oracle:OraDB18Home2:N:
That made the trick and HAS can start the instance with new ORACLE_HOME.
I would assume runInstaller should to this task, and I have no idea why it was not done.
Just one more line on my list of post-activities.
