Script to add SCSI drives on the fly

Very often when you are busy with VMWare, you need an extra disk. Now creating the disk can happen while the VM Linux guest is active. However you don't see the disk immediately. A reboot will help obviously, but I found a nice script on http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ that will show the new SCSI device, so that you can continue and add the disk without a reboot. Just search for the rescan-scsi-bus.sh script.

It is on my VMWare Server now and will go directly to each new Linux guest from now on. Any possibility to prevent a reboot is welcome ;-)

Patching with OPatch

Hmm, sometimes life is funny. If I say to you that I have a generic patch, you would expect one patch that can be applied to all versions.
Not in this case.
I need to apply a patch for the Oracle IDM Suite (10.1.4).
Finding the patch is already difficult - and then there are four versions of the same patch - apparently based on different versions of the underlying J2EE. In my opinion this is not generic.

Trial and error led me to one of the four versions - which then came back with:
OPatch detects your platform as 46 while this patch xxxxxxx supports platforms:
0 (Generic Platform)

So again - it seems that my definition of generic differs from Oracle's view. I would understand an error, if the patch was for platform 46 or 18 or whatever.
But here a generic patch is apparently not applicable for my platform.

Luckily Metalink Note 404473.1 offers a solution.
So setting the following:

export OPATCH_PLATFORM_ID=0

does trick the opatch into believing that it is no Linux machine any longer.
Running opatch apply now works.

Still leaves me puzzled about the meaning of GENERIC.