Usn's IT Blog

If you plan to install Oracle products, be prepared for surprise of random kind. :) The new Grid Infrastructure is no exception of this rule: I tried to install it on a SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10.

Quick facts about the setup:

• SLES 10 SP 2 64bit
• Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.1 x86_64
• all devices are specified via UDEV symlinks like /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-1HITACHI_732342670003

Problem description

Nearly everything went well, but $GRID_HOME/root.sh failed this way:

ORA-27091: unable to queue I/O
ORA-15081: failed to submit an I/O operation to a disk
ORA-06512: at line 4
PROT-1: Failed to initialize ocrconfig

(By the way, see how to repeat root.sh here.)

This just tastes like catastrophe: Why does a full-fledged SAN-provided LUN has I/O errors? The cross-check with “dd” cooled me down immediately, because it did not show any problems, reading and writing provided full power, no stalls and no errors. So calmly looking up My Oracle Support (fka Metalink) brought me to Article ID 955550.1 that’s talking about ASMLIB. I did not use ASMLIB because I don’t like it, but they solved their problem by an owner change of the device used for OCR. The trouble described there is, that the Oracle Clusterware does not accept OS user “oracle” just as a member in unix group “disk” that has rw permissions on the device, no, user “oracle” has to be the owner of the device!

Read more…

To clean up a tilted installation of Oracle Grid Infrastructure isn’t that intuitive. I had to do it today, and this is my collection what to do and what to read. It’s made for repeating root.sh, that’s not allowed to run twice or more times without cleaning up in between.

So first have a look at Coskan’s page, which contains all hints I did need. By the way, he had the same problem that made me trying this:

ORA-27091: unable to queue I/O
ORA-15081: failed to submit an I/O operation to a disk
ORA-06512: at line 4
PROT-1: Failed to initialize ocrconfig

Furthermore, read in the official docs about the correct cleanup procedure. The keyword is: Deconfiguring Oracle Clusterware Without Removing Binaries

Last but not least, metalink notes 942166.1 and 955550.1 (for Linux) might be enlighting.

Summary, for the folks in a hurry:

# $GRID_HOME/root.sh
... fails ...
# $GRID_HOME/crs/install/rootcrs.pl -verbose -deconfig -force [-lastnode]
... fix your problem ...
# $GRID_HOME/root.sh
... hopefully - works!

Be careful
Martin Klier