Friday 13 June, 2008 - 00:04
Still playing with Grid Control.
I have managed to edit the hosts file on the Vaio (Vista) by using the procedure from Changing your hosts file in Vista. I can access the gridctrl from the Vaio after I enable the Intranet settings (which is apparently less secure than the Internet!).
The advantage of using IE7 on Vista over XP Pro is that the pop-ups do not lock out. This is very important when uploading patches.
I have manage to upload P4547817 (10.2.0.2 for Linux x86) via the Patch Cache link on the Deployments tab of Grid Control.
The patching is tricky because with ASM, I had to select Oracle Homes then select ASM. The ASM instance does not appear under Oracle Instances.
I submitted the job but the job was suspended because I did not allow jobs to run when I started the blackout on rmancat. I had to end the blackout and start it again.
Even when I allow jobs to run during blackouts, the patch job is still suspended due to blackout. This could be caused by clock skew on rmancat. I thought I had corrected this through VMtools.
Overall, I am impressed by the patch management facilities of Grid Control. Without my MetaLink account, I cannot test the automatic download feature. But the manual archiving of patches works. I have successfully patch ASM and an Oracle database.
There is one serious gotcha: this method of patching copies the patch files into each Oracle home that is patched. I got caught out by running out of disk space.