Database Software

We are running ASM on a 2 node RAC running Oracle 10.2.0.1. It is installed on RHEL3 64-bit using a bash shell. ASM is installed in its own home. When we do a *"ps -ef|grep ora"*, we see the services for ASM1 and ASM2 on their respective servers. Next we do srvctl status asm -n <node name>, and receive the message *ASM instance +ASM1(2) is running on node <node name>*. The problem comes when we try to access the ASM instances and asmcmd. We type *export ORACLE_SID=+ASM2. echo $ORACLE_SID returns +ASM2* then sqlplus '/ as sysdba' and receive the messages "*SQL>Connected to an idle instance"*. Again, per srvctl, the ASM instance should already be up, so we are not sure why we are receiving this message. On the off chance that it has crashed, we tried to start it up manually. It failed because it was looking for its init file in the *$ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory* (it resides in an ASM controlled directory, not in $ORACLE_HOME/dbs. Could this be the problem?). Afterwards, we try the command asmcmd which results in ORA-01034: ORACLE not available/ORA-27101:shared memory realm does not exist.

Any thoughts / help?

The original problem was that, on reboot, only one DB instance was starting. When looking at the logs of the failed instance, it states that it failed because ASM was not available.

Cheers

K