Opatch error: Unable to lock Central Inventory

[Former Member]

A) When applying Oracle one-off patches I get this error:

Unable to lock Central Inventory. Stop trying per user-request?

OPatchSession cannot load inventory for the given Oracle Home /oracle/VRQ/102_64. Possible causes are:

No read or write permission to ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage

Central Inventory is locked by another OUI instance

No read permission to Central Inventory

The lock file exists in ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage

The Oracle Home does not exist in Central Inventory

B) Researching the error, I find thes solutions...

This error may occur because of any one or more of the following reasons:

1. The ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage may not have read/write permissions. Ensure that you give read/write permissions to this folder and apply the patch again.

2. There may be another Oracle Universal Installer instance running. Stop it and try applying the patch again.

3. The Central Inventory may not have read permission. Ensure that you give read permission to the Central Inventory and apply the patch again.

4. The ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage directory might be locked. If this directory is locked, you will find a file named patch_locked inside this directory. This may be due to a previously failed installation of a patch. To remove the lock, restore the Oracle home and remove the patch_locked file from the ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage directory. For more information on restoring the Oracle home, refer to section "Restoring Oracle Homes".

5. The Oracle home may not be present in the Central Inventory. This may be due to a corrupted or lost inventory or the inventory may not be registered in the Central Inventory. For more information, refer to section "Diagnosing and Recovering from Central Inventory Corruption".

C) Everyhing looks okay. What am I missing?

Oracle - 10.2.0.4

OS - AIX 6.1

Multiple database on the server: IPQ and VRQ

Thanks in advance.

[Former Member]

Closed

[volker_borowski2]

Hi,

did you setup a seperate oraInventory for each of both instances as recommended?

Check the contents of oraInst.loc

(On Solaris in /var/opt/oracle, not sure if the same on AIX)

It should point to the Inventory Location.

May be yours is pointing to the other ORACLE_HOME-Inventory.

I tend to use the Inventory location

/oracle/SID/oraInventory, so each ORACLE_HOME has its

own non-mixed inventory.

But you have to keep in mind that oraInst.loc needs to be adjusted,

when you use runInstaller or OPatch !

Or is one ORACLE_HOME a binary copy of another?

A bianary copied ORACLE_HOME is non patchable at all, as far as I know.

In this case (beside this is not a supported SAP configuration), you need to

apply the patches to your copy-Source and do a re-copy.

There is a meatlink note describing how to use a cloned ORACLE_HOME,

but again: This is not supported within SAP!

Hope this helps

Volker

[Former Member]

Hello!

I found the problem.

It was with directory permissions on the directory ../oraInventory/locks

Thanks.