6.28.2008

A stupid and silly issue took hours to resolve

This morning we were trying to create a RAC database using the dbca utility on HP UX Itanium II servers and a silly/stupid error keep coming for a long time and we got strucked for good amount of time.

The error message which was coming 'Unable to copy the '/etc/oratab' to '/tmp/oratab.' and when ignore option was choosen from the error screen, the subsequent message was 'Encountered file error when copying listeners from home=$ORACLE_HOME/asm".

We certainly knew that the issue is either with the permission or copying the said file and our immediate step was checking the permisson and ownership on the oratab file. Everything was just fine and then we try to create a file in the /tmp directory using touch command from the Oracle user and it worked without any hassles.

We were able to create the RAC database successfully on a single node and when tried to add instance on the other node, the same issue encountered again and again.

We finally thought of running the dbca in tracing mode and when the same problem arises and when we had a look at the trace file, we couldn't stop wondering about the silly/stupid thing which Oracle was complaining.

The trace file reveals that it is looking for 'scp' executable in '/usr/local/bin' location, whereas, the 'scp' excutable was in '/usr/bin' directory. We simply created a link for 'scp' in the '/usr/local/bin' and dbca run smoothly and we were able to complete the RAC database creation.

Past three months, its been really a great working expeirence on RAC and I must say, we have faced hell a lot of issues while trying to implement RAC on HP Virtual Machines. Definately, its a great learning phase.

Guess what's next? MOVING 8 DEVELOPMENT DATABASE TO RAC from AIX to HP. Umm.. a good and taugh task ahead.

I will keep posting my experience and the issues that have faced while setting up our 16 node RAC with 8 databases.

Happy reading,

Jaffar

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Jaffar,
Is there any special reason for setting up of RAC enverionment for development databases?

The Human Fly said...

No special reasons. Since we are planning RAC for production, management wants all the way through RAC, i.e., for development, test and production.

Unknown said...

Jaffar,
Thanks for this post. I'm running into the same error, but adding the /usr/local/bin link to scp did not work for me. I saw some other notes saying to create a link in /usr/local/bin pointing to ssh. It sounds like we're trying to emulate a linux distro.

My error is "Encountered file error when copying listeners from home=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.1.0".

Since the linking fixes didn't work, how to you set DBCA in tracing mode?

Thanks!
-David

Deepak Gupta Oracle DBA said...

Although I encountered similar error message during of Oracle 10g database creation on 11g RAC Environment but I followed Metalink [ID 763578.1] to fix the problem.

"Encountered file error when copying listeners from home=/u01/app/11.2.0/grid"

Steps to fix the problem:

Environment variable TNS_ADMIN was set to the new ORACLE_HOME
$ echo $TNS_ADMIN
If set, unset and run dbua
$ unset TNS_ADMIN
$ echo $TNS_ADMIN
$ dbua