As part of a routine upgrade to 11.1 we decided to use dbua to complete all the upgrade tasks. Dev & test were a breeze but the DBUA screens on Production came with a Big OK Sign with no info whatsoever. It was kind of annoying but after digging into $ORACLE_BASE/cfgtoologs/dbua/logs was able to Find the error to be
java.util.StringTokenizer.nextToken(StringTokenizer.java:259)
oracle.sysman.assistants.util.attributes.InitParamAttributes.loadInitParams(InitParamAttributes.java
:1763)
oracle.sysman.assistants.dbma.backend.Database.updateNonDefaultInitParams(Database.java:1068)
oracle.sysman.assistants.dbma.backend.CompManager.obtainDatabaseInformation(CompManager.java:2272)
Metalink search came up with a error in the DBUA utility for 10R2 (Oracle Please update that this issue exists in 11 also). Note id # 444148.1 describes the situation as a parameter that have single quotes.
in our case i had smtp_out_server=' ' . This cause dbua to unable to parse the spfile.
Solution was to create a pfile remove this parameter and proceed. DBUA Proceeded to next step after this