Weblogic patch rollback issues in Oracle EBS R12.2

When you try to rollback a weblogic patch in Oracle EBS R12.2, you might run into issues similar to below:

$ ./bsu.sh -remove -patchlist=YIJF -prod_dir=/u01/install/VISION/fs2/FMW_Home/wlserver_10.3 -verbose
Checking for conflicts..
No conflict(s) detected

Starting removal of Patch ID: YIJF
Restoring /d1/V1223B5B/fs1/FMW_Home/modules/com.bea.core.datasource6.binding_1.10.0.0.jar
from /u01/install/VISION/fs2/FMW_Home/patch_wls1036/backup/backup.jar
Result: Failure
Failure condition follows:
An error occured while removing patches – run with logging to obtain detailed information
java.io.FileNotFoundException: /d1/V1223B5B/fs1/FMW_Home/modules/com.bea.core.datasource6.binding_1.10.0.0.jar (No such file or directory)
Result: Failure
Failure condition follows:
An error occured while removing patches – run with logging to obtain detailed information
java.io.FileNotFoundException: /d1/V1223B5B/fs1/FMW_Home/modules/com.bea.core.datasource6.binding_1.10.0.0.jar (No such file or directory)

If you observe the errors, it’s trying to restore the jar file to a location that is not present in the current filesystem. This error was captured in a VISION instance created from Oracle VM Template. So you can see that the file path seems to be a path used by an Oracle internal system where the VM template is created. There is not much harm caused by the above issue to the instance.

Now consider this hypothetical situation, where you are trying to rollback a weblogic patch in patch fs ( fs2 ) that was previously applied to fs1 in Production Oracle E-Business Suite R12.2. So the patch history in the patch fs ( fs2) will still have file paths of fs1. So when you rollback a patch it will restore the files to RUN FS ( fs1). This can cause a havoc and  a big outage to online users.

As of now bsu utility doesn’t seem to handle issues this kind of situation. So all Oracle EBS Apps DBAs out there, make sure to check the below file for correct paths, before you try to rollback any weblogic patch

$ vi $FMW_HOME/patch_wls1036/registry/patch-backup.xml

A permanent solution to this problem would be to update bsu patch utility to not restore or touch files outside the weblogic home. Hope Oracle Development notices this issue before it effects some customers EBS production instance.