Error cloning a clone

A few posts ago I hit an issue with executing the runInstaller. It still surprised me that after hundreds of installs you can still hit new errors. The other day I hit a new error while cloning an EBS environment. While preparing the environment for cloning (executing adpreclone.pl dbTier), the error below appeared:


RC-50409: Topology information required for cloning not found in the database. Make sure that
AutoConfig was run successfully prior to starting Rapid Clone, and try again
Raised by oracle.apps.ad.tools.AdCreateCtlFile
RC-50208: Exception in method gen_crctrfclone_sql
RC-50208: Exception in Constructor AdCreateCtlFile
Raised by oracle.apps.ad.tools.AdCreateCtlFile


This particular environment is a clone of our production environment. After it was built users had performed some work and wanted it cloned to another environment. There are two solutions for this particular error, which can be found in detail in Metalink Note: 376964.1.


The easiest solution is to run autoconfig at the dbTier level. The curious part is that since this environment is a clone of production, autoconfig would would have been executed as part of the post cloning steps (adcfgclone.pl dbTier). I checked my post cloning logs and indeed it completed successfully. I executed autoconfig ($ORACLE_HOME/appsutil/bin/adconfig.sh) on the database tier again and the preclone script finished without error.