Installing CPU patches on RAC environment?

I have installed the April CPU patches on my non operating environment and my operating environment. Both environments have a 2 node RAC setup and should be identical. But when installing the patch, the opatch utility reported a single node RAC environment on the non operating environment and a 2 node RAC on the operating environment. Is there any reasons why this is different? The installation of the patch on the non-OE went very smooth. I just had to install on both nodes. But on the OE, the patch installation wanted to propogate files to the other node and this brought up many errors, ecspecially with the relinking of the binaries. To make a long story short, I just relinked the binaries on both nodes after installing the patch and everything is working fine, but I would like to find out why the RAC environment is viewed differently on the non-OE compared to the OE. That way if there is a problem, I can fix it before being exposed to it first on the OE. Thanks for any help!!

I had a problem when applying a patch on our RAC cluster a few months back. I had to do a:

opatch apply -local

to just apply the patch on the node where opatch is being run rather than install on both nodes by propagating across the interconnect. Can't give you a reason why though, sorry.

Thanks I will try that next time, but I would still like to get the non-OE to be a clone of the OE so I can fix problems when doing other tasks other than installing patches.

I have been doing some comparisons of the 2 environments and ran across this. I compared the /etc/hosts file between the 2 environments and the non-OE hosts file is missing the #interconnect addresses section. In the OE hosts file, it have the 2 nodes listed with their IP's. Could this be the reason for the differences? And if so, how exactly is the outside world viewing this databases? It can't be split brained or one of the nodes would fail, correct? Thanks!!