Monthly Archives: April 2020


Attention OPatch 12.2.0.1.19: ‘opatch util cleanup’ command deletes files from /etc, /bin, /lib 2

On January 28th 2020 I reported to Oracle on a Severy 1 SR that the latest OPatch version tries to delete system files from /etc, /bin, /lib :

I wrote in the SR the use case, provided the logs. On my case, the opatch cleanup command “just” deleted the configuration files of my backup client in /etc (opatch deletes files that are writable by the user who calls the command – ‘oracle’/’grid’ in most of the cases).

The location from where ‘opatch cleanup util’ tries to delete files depends from where you call it! So, if you call from / or from $ORACLE_BASE or from $ORACLE_HOME/OPatch you’ll get different behaviours!

It took two months until I got an answer to that SR, saying a bug was created and it will be fixed on the next version of OPatch:

Today there was a release of April 2020 Security patches, the latest Oracle Patch Bundles. To my surprise, for Oracle versions 12.2, 18c and 19c, there is the requirement of using OPatch 12.2.0.1.19 version, the exact same version that has this dangerous bug!

The bug reported end of January was not yet fixed! At least, on OPatch readme there is now a warning:

So, be careful until then and do not use ‘opatch util cleanup’. Anyway, this command is not anymore needed, as a cleanup (without deleting any wrong file) of the $ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage directory is automatically done at the end of the patching.


Oracle 19c – TFA and Oracle Restart (SIHA)

It took Oracle two months and some persuasion effort to make the analyst to read and believe what I’ve written on the Service Request, but the answer finally come from development:

TFA is disabled in all 19.* SIHA versions. Will let you know once enabled.
You can download TFA from MOS and install it.

My original request in February was:

I’m installing Oracle Restart in silent mode.

I see that TFA is provided both in GI and RDBMS homes under $ORACLE_HOME/suptools/tfa/release/tfa_home

How can I make it to install THIS VERSION OF TFA (and not downloaded from Oracle Support) automatically part of a silent mode installation?

At the moment, when it runs the root.sh from RDBMS installation, it calls both
. /u00/app/oracle/product/19.6.0/install/utl/rootmacro.sh "$@"
and
/u00/app/oracle/product/19.6.0/suptools/tfa/release/tfa_home/install/roottfa.sh

The rootmacro.sh sets:
INSTALL_TFA=0

On the output of the root.sh script there is:

Oracle Trace File Analyzer (TFA) is available at : /u00/app/oracle/product/19.6.0/bin/tfactl

but this does not exist:
-bash: /u00/app/oracle/product/19.6.0/bin/tfactl: No such file or directory

So, I repeat the question:
How can I make it to install the TFA provided part of GI/RDBMS home (and not downloaded from Oracle Support) AUTOMATICALLY and PART OF SILENT MODE INSTALLATION?