Unless you’re in a cave asleep, you’ve seen the recent Oracle PSUs and patches that were released in January.  This has many of my customers patching their agents, and a few have noticed a problem with some previously applied patches.  Thanks to Brian for pointing this out!

If you applied the recommended Java patches sometime last year (18502187, 18721761), and you go to apply the 12.1.0.4.5 agent patch 20282974 (or an earlier bundle), the analyze step will fail as the Java patches are included in the agent bundle, but for some reason it can’t “ignore” them.    Checking the detailed results of the failed Analyze job will show which step failed.   In this specific case, the step PrerequisiteCheckForApply will be marked Failed and the error will look like this:

To remedy this with EM, you can create a patch plan with the Java patches (18502187, 18721761) and select Rollback in the Deployment Options.  This will run the rollback for these patches.

Once rolled back, re-analyze your 12.1.0.4.5 patch plan and it should be successful and allow you to deploy!

When you update Agents, keep these things in mind:

• Be sure to update any Agent clones/gold images with the newly updated patch and plug-ins if they’ve been upgraded or patched.
• If you staged patches for auto-deployment in the OMS $ORACLE_HOME/install/oneoffs, remove the old patches and you should just need the 12.1.0.4.5 patch now, or any current Discovery patches.
• Update your procedural documents to reflect the current patches required.

For more details on how to patch your agent using EM, see the Administrator’s guide.