OPatch Failure

I was encountering an OPatch failure during my Oracle Application Server 10g upgrade. The reason is that our previous developers failed during the last patch installation. The failure message is displayed below:

      Interim Patch is holding the lock from xxxxxxx

It looked like during the last unsuccessful patch installation. Patch number xxxxxxx acquired the patch lock but not released it. When the new patch was trying to aquire the same lock. It would be on hold. This information is generated during the last patch run and stored in the patch_locked file under the directory:

       $ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage

If some interruption happened during an unsuccessful installation of the patches, the locks would not be released and this file would not be removed as well. Therefore, the following patch installation would encounter the share lock issue further caused by this file.

    Delete this file and then reinstall the patch. You would be good to go!

OPatch Rollback

Sometimes when you applied the patches, there would be some incompatiabity that would arise in the system. This new upgrade needs to be rolled back to keep the original environment.

Here are two useful commands for checking the version and the list of pathes that are touched.

opatch version

opatch lsinventory

Suppose my OAS Home is under /oracle/app/10gR3mid

Suppose you put your opatch folder temporarily under /tmp and under the tmp folder there is patch folder : 10031961

Run the command below marked in red in each subfolder of 10031961, suppose we would firstly rollback 10011970

So let us look at the before and after results from running opatch lsinventory

Before we apply the patch rollback, you could see the patch number exsits in the red box. 

After we apply the rollback it is gone.