Blog dedicated to Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite) Technology; covers Apps Architecture, Administration and third party bolt-ons to Apps

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

adpreclone.pl fails with segmentation fault, bus error, out of memory

Manoj pinged me about this issue last night.  Whenever he was trying to do adpreclone.pl dbTier or AppsTier, when he entered the apps password, the process would crash with either segmentation fault, bus error or out of memory.

I tried executing top and it was also ending up with segmentation fault some of the time.  At the times it would start, it would give a flashing

I checked the server memory and it had 73 GB free memory.

Eventually  I opened up the adpreclone.pl script in vi to study what it was doing.  At one place, I noticed that it was looking for the environment variable $USER.  When I checked, on the server, echo $USER, did not return anything.  I checked on other working servers and echo $USER returned the unix applmgr username.

So I manually set

USER=applmgr
export USER
echo $USER

perl adpreclone.pl appsTier

Entered apps password, and it worked fine.

This was a new server. Seems like unix team missed something during this build.  I tried looking up /etc/profile, but wasn't able to find out why the environment variable USER was not set.  I'll update this post, when I discover the reason.