Introduction:

Soon in a theater near you as a main event, the patching of a lot of Linux (database) servers. So it is once more time to dust off the documentation and refresh memory because in the past there has always been a lot of debate was between dbas should we or should we not re-link the Oracle Software once Linux patching has been done? Motivation would be that folks stated “but we have a running version now, and don’t know what misery recompile will bring”.  Plain and simple and with Oracle Support recommendation the answer to that question should always be YES. If required libraries in Linux have changed it is best to find out during that one maintenance window instead of finding out – weeks or months later when most of us have forgotten about the patch activities.

Below steps are a bit specific for my environments where I have setup Asm and Oracle Restart on various single servers. Yet I hope this note will be of benefit as a general overview

Stopping the databases under control in an easy way:

 

Below you will find some nice feature of the srvctl  status – stop – start command in order to easily capture  – stop and start all the databases  that are part of a specific ORACLE_HOME. ( Commands and examples come from Oracle Documentation (https://docs.oracle.com/html/E25494_01/lot.htm)

srvctl status home -o oracle_home -s state_file

srvctl status home Options

Option	Description
-o	Complete path of the Oracle home
-s	Complete path of the state file

srvctl stop home -o oracle_home -s state_file [-t stop_options] [-f]

srvctl stop home Options

Option	Description
-o	Complete path of the Oracle home
-s	Complete path of the state file
-t stop_options	SHUTDOWN command options for the database (for example: NORMAL, TRANSACTIONAL, IMMEDIATE, or ABORT). Default is IMMEDIATE.
-f	Force stop each component

srvctl start home -o oracle_home -s state_file

srvctl start home Options

Option	Description
-o	Complete path of the Oracle home
-s	Complete path of the state file. The state file contains the current state information for the components in the Oracle home and is created when the srvctl stop home command or the srvctl status home command is run.

 

As prep for the relinking of the software I performed following step:

srvctl status home -o /opt/oracle/product/112_ee_64/db -s /var/tmp/state_file.status

srvctl stop home -o /opt/oracle/product/112_ee_64/db -s /var/tmp/state_file.dmp

Note: in the stop home command a file is created at given location. Oracle will put in all Instances-Databases that are part of that specific Home. The nice part is that this  .dmp file can be used in one command to start all databases again once things are done.

In Order to relink the Rdbms software:

After shutting down the databases (see above):

Had the ORACLE_HOME  set properly

$ORACLE_HOME/bin/relink all

Note: writing relink log to: /opt/oracle/product/112_ee_64/db/install/relink.log

In Order to relink the Oracle Restart software:

Prepare the Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a Standalone Server home for modification using the following procedure:

1. Log in as the Oracle Grid Infrastructure software owner user and change the directory to the path Grid_home/bin, where Grid_home is the path to the Oracle Grid Infrastructure home:

cd /opt/crs/product/112_ee_64/crs/bin

2. Shut down the Oracle Restart stack using the following command:

crsctl stop has –f

This will show:

CRS-2791: Starting shutdown of Oracle High Availability Services-managed resources on 'myhost01hr'

CRS-2673: Attempting to stop 'ora.LISTENER.lsnr' on 'myhost01hr'

CRS-2677: Stop of 'ora.LISTENER.lsnr' on 'myhost01hr' succeeded

CRS-2673: Attempting to stop 'ora.evmd' on 'myhost01hr'

CRS-2677: Stop of 'ora.evmd' on 'myhost01hr' succeeded

CRS-2793: Shutdown of Oracle High Availability Services-managed resources on 'myhost01hr' has completed

CRS-4133: Oracle High Availability Services has been stopped.

oracle@myhost01hr:/opt/crs/product/112_ee_64/crs/bin [+ASM]#

Then:

Relink Oracle Grid Infrastructure:

1. Login as root
   
   cd /opt/crs/product/112_ee_64/crs/crs/install
   
   perl roothas.pl -unlock
   
   Log in as the Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a Standalone Server owner:
   
   $ export ORACLE_HOME=/opt/crs/product/112_ee_64/crs
   
   $ $ORACLE_HOME/bin/relink

Note: This will show: oracle@myhost01hr:/opt/oracle [+ASM]# $ORACLE_HOME/bin/relink
writing relink log to: /opt/crs/product/112_ee_64/crs/install/relink.log

1. Login as root again:
   
   cd/opt/crs/product/112_ee_64/crs/rdbms/install/
   
   ./rootadd_rdbms.sh 
   
   Note. Rootadd_rdbms came back very fast without any output.
   
   cd /opt/crs/product/112_ee_64/crs/crs/install
   
   perl roothas.pl -patch

Checked with:

1. export $ORACLE_HOME=/opt/crs/product/112_ee_64/crs/
2. ./crsctl check has

This showed:CRS-4638: Oracle High Availability Services is online

Starting the databases under control in an easy way:

When the command srvctl stop home was issued a  file was created in /var/tmp as state_file.dmp.  Now we can start all dbs again with one command:

srvctl start home -o /opt/oracle/product/112_ee_64/db -s /var/tmp/state_file.dmp

As always happy reading And happy Dba..