Andreas' Adventures

Another issue during the installation with RAC on Windows was the fact that the VIPCA failed. Of course both machines were pingable so there was no obvious error. After some searching the following emerged: the VIP's for both nodes were all on one node. While trying to move the VIP to the other node it showed that the network was called "Team A + B" on machine 1 and "Team A+ B" on machine two. Apparently under windows the network name is used as well when it comes to the VIPCA. After fixing this error the VIPCA completed and the resource could be moved to the second node.

Thanks to my friend Robert I now grasped the concept of the VIP in RAC environments. VIP's were created in order to speed up the process of letting the client know that the server died. Imagine that the server crashed without any possibility to inform the client. The client will then initiate a request and has to wait for the TCP timeout. That can easily be 120 seconds. The client should therefore use the VIP in the tnsnames.ora. Performing a request now will immediately give a response. The client can then initiate its TAF faster.

During the last post I mentioned that we needed rsh in order to fallback as the ssh apparently didn't work. Now when the database should be build with the dbca an error was thrown, stating that the user oracle had no user equivalence on its own node. Searching Metalink revealed that the dbca was looking for ssh in /usr/local/bin/ssh . However, ssh on AIX is located at /usr/bin/ssh . Created a softlink solved this problem. This could also be the explanation for the problems I had earlier. When setting up the user equivalance with ssh you use the commandline. As /usr/bin is in the path before /usr/local/bin from the commandline the ssh works just fine. When this is hardcoded in the Universal Insstaller or the dbca you could get these problems. BTW: it seems that this is solved in 10.2.x cu Andreas

Installing RAC does always have some nice surprises. For example the following: Although CRS and cluvrfy did not pose big problems (from what I've heard - didn't do it myself) the node could not be found. SSH works - of course. After some trying the decision was made to open RSH on both nodes. Voila. It works. This was on an AIX 5.3 . So this might be of some help for you out there. cu Andreas