ORA-20001,ORA-20202,ORA-06512 errors during R12.1.1 upgrade.

During one of the R12 Upgrades, This below error was encountered and it's not a generic error and very few have encountered this scenario or May be I'm the only unlucky one, which has triggered me to write this blog. I'm sharing this information over this blog, In case some one upgrading to R12 make sure that these settings/requirements are in place. Believe me, the solution is very simple but to get to the root cause and finding a solution during upgrade down time is very very stressful. May be this information would be useful to some one. Wish, no one to get into such situation especially during PROD upgrade.

Background:
Upgrade Iteration 1:
- We cloned 11.5.10.2 environment to a new server.
- Completed functional steps to complete/enable multi org etc.
- Copied over the DB to another machine,
-Converted the DB to 64 bit and upgraded to 11.2.0.3 with Examples.
-Installed R12.1.1 techstack.
-Applied R12 upgrade patch, and then to R12.1.3 RUP.
- OAS patching etc.
- Some issues we encountered, but all went as planned.

Upgrade Iteration 2:
The same steps were followed, went ahead as planned.

PROD Upgrade 3 :
No cloning required, as we are doing this time on PROD.
All the steps were executed successfully until R12.1.1 upgrade patch, the job ran for about 14 hours approximately and then some of the sql's were failing with the below error message.

ERROR at line 1:
ORA-20001: Please specify a valid printer.
Either you have not specified a printer for your report, or the printer name
you have given does not match that in the program definition.
Please specify a printer in the program definition, report set definition, run
reports form or as a profile option.
ORA-06512: at "APPS.HR_UTILITY", line 939
ORA-06512: at line 46

and


SQL> @bomcpbom.sql
declare
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-20202: Please specify a valid printer.
Either you have not specified a printer for your report, or the printer name
you have given does not match that in the program definition.
Please specify a printer in the program definition, report set definition, run
reports form or as a profile option.
ORA-06512: at line 38 


Initially, these were the steps taken.


1. Checked the worker log files --> Same error.
2. Tried executing the same sql from the sql> prompt --> Resulted in the same error.
3. No relevant hits in the Metalink/Google.

4. As usual raised an OTN thread, of course Hussein Sawwan was the first and only one to respond.

<I've done some more steps here to check the printer settings at the OS level, tried printing a job to a printer at OS level etc> 

5. Parallely raised an SR. 

After working round the clock in an SEV1 SR,  it was concluded to be a bug. Details are as below.

Bug : 8337047. product version 11.5.10.2.

SR analyst suggested me to update the profile option "Printer"  at the site level to "noprint" value and redo the upgrade from scratch,i.e starting from migrating to 64 bit...

Observation: When I checked with the "Printer" profile option in PROD the vaue was blank, where as in cloned UAT and SIT test environments the value was set to "no print" with Record history as "Autoinstall". 

Created  by "AUTO INSTALL"

Updated by "AUTO INSTALL" 

DATE: Pointed to the date of cloning.

So this gave me confidence or a hope to expect light at the end of tunnel.


Updated the "Print" profile option to "noprint" as suggested and upgrade went smooth with only expected issues/errors.


Happy Reading/Sharing folks.