Sunday, January 6, 2013

Instantiating the ASM disk failed error

IT Problems can be very tricky sometimes. While installing ASM on Linux today I was having an issue with instantiating the disks. Everything seemed OK and the following command was giving me an all OK status

$ oracleasm status

But when I tried to mark the disks as ASM disks I continued to get the message that "Instantiating the disk failed". The following command was failing.

$ oracleasm createdisk DATAVOL /dev/sdb1

For two hours I was stuck with Google but unable to resolve the issue. The simple solution that came out was that SELinux was stopping this. I wasn't aware that SELinux on my host was enabled. I disabled the Firewall while installing the operating system but forgot about SELinux. I disabled and it worked like a charm.

This is where most of the IT problem originate from. When you disable the Firewall and SELinux on a production system, the System Admin may want to kill you. But if you don't you will be hard pressed to find a solution that is suitable for both DBA and System Admin. 

Fortunately mine was a personal test system and was not required to run away from any System Admin. 

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