How does 11g CRS start if OCR is in ASM
I've got an 11gR2 2 node RAC cluster that I inherited running on Win 2008 R2. Being only somewhat familiar with RAC from a 10g class I took years ago, my question is this...
CRS needs to read the OCR to start up. In 11gR2, by default the OCR is stored in ASM. ASM however gets started after CRS (by CRS). How is that possible? How does CRS start ASM, if it needs ASM running to read the OCR?
I have a 2nd question too that may be related (or not). When a node crashes (blue screens) or gets restarted via the start button (start/shutdown/restart) it never rejoins the cluster. The only way I've ever gotten either node to rejoin is to power cycle it. Even then I've found I must wait for one node to come back up completely with all Oracle services running before I can start the 2nd node or else it will not join the cluster. Is this a known/common problem? Does it behave like this on Linux too? The error I always get is that CRS is not running. If I run "crsctl start crs" however, it says it IS running. If I run "crsctl stop crs" or "crsctl stat res" it says it's NOT running.
TIS