Thanks all if anyone is interested in Grid Control 10.2.0.5 when you setup proxy credentials for communicating with MOS then by default these also get applied to the agents (and then typically communication fails) There is a setting on the patching setup page to fix this. Unfortunately however I can't at the moment click apply because of MOS being unavailable. All the test buttons work but it seems that when you apply the settings Grid actually tries to download a pointless file. > Although metalink credentials are correct and successfully validated, an > error occurred while downloading a sample patch from the patch url > specified. Please check log files for details > -- Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.orawin.info