How to determine if the new oraerror.dat is loaded in OracleAgent

Recently, i need to change the behaviour of VCS how it managed my DB. To cut the story short, i wanted to check if the oraerror.dat file is loaded by the Oracle Agent so that monitoring behaviour is according to the oraerror.dat file. If the oraerror.dat is not loaded, the agent will assume the default behaviour after default monitoring (which is FAILOVER). Query the number of entries.

# egrep -v '^$|^#|}' /opt/VRTSagents/ha/bin/Oracle/oraerror.dat | wc -l
187

Check the gcore of the OracleAgent process, the data structure "token_data" stores the in-memory oraerror.dat.

# ps -ef |grep OracleAge
    root  5282     1  0   Aug 26 ?        5:10 /opt/VRTSagents/ha/bin/Oracle/OracleAgent -type Oracle -agdir /opt/VRTSagents/h
    root 23533 29154  0 10:33:32 pts/3    0:00 grep OracleAge

# gcore 5282
gcore: core.5282 dumped

Take a look at the 7th field, which is the number of entries in oraerror.dat plus 1.

# mdb /opt/VRTSagents/ha/bin/Oracle/OracleAgent core.5282
Loading modules: [ libthread.so.1 libc.so.1 ld.so.1 ]
> *token_data/20D
0x97000:        32              663408          0               690328          690424          629608
                188             3               1162824517      1330332928      97              1111573570
                1112492800      80              436440          2               262144          19800
                0               0

ctrl+D to exit. Both the 7th field and the number of entries of oraerror.dat matches. Also look at the permission of the file! If due to some reasons, the oraerror.dat file not loaded by the OracleAgent when it started, check that the file is readable and contains the valid entries, then restart the Oracle Agent.

# ls -l oraerror.dat
-rwxr--r--   1 root     sys         3611 Jul 15  2009 oraerror.dat

# haagent -stop Oracle -force -sys myserver
# haagent -start Oracle -sys myserver

# haagent -display | grep Oracle
Oracle        AgentDirectory /opt/VRTSagents/ha/bin/Oracle
Oracle        AgentFile
Oracle        Faults         0
Oracle        Running        Yes
Oracle        Started        Yes

Please noted that if oraerror.dat is modified, the agent has to be restarted in order to have the agent recognise the change. Reference: http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH155872