We ran into this on 11.1.0.7 and it was related to a patch installed for CRS. The patch instructions specified that the path for Oracle Home be specified and the example showed a trailing slash for Oracle Home, but in fact this should not have been put into place. I think we had to manually modify scripts racgwrap and srvctl. However, I cannot tell if you have RAC on this system, and my experience may be unrelated. Check your scripts for racgwrap and srvctl in your CRS home and see if the HOME’s have a trailing slash. From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andrew Kerber Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2010 9:47 AM To: ORACLE-L Subject: slightly OT, appears to be Sun OS issue I am running into something really strange in one of our Solaris zones. I expect that the problem stems from someone not entering the Oracle home path correctly on installation, since it appears to have an extra '/' in the Oracle home name, but I have never seen this elsewhere, and cannot figure out how to fix it. Its probably easier for you to look at my steps below than try to explain it further. For some reason, I have to have a '//' in the Oracle home name to connect to the ASM instance: kerbera@dwprdap01-> sudo su - oracle Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.10 Generic January 2005 You have mail. oracle@dwprdap01-> ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/product/asm oracle@dwprdap01-> export ORACLE_HOME oracle@dwprdap01-> PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH oracle@dwprdap01-> export PATH oracle@dwprdap01-> ORACLE_SID=+ASM oracle@dwprdap01-> export ORACLE_SID oracle@dwprdap01-> echo $ORACLE_HOME /oracle/product/asm oracle@dwprdap01-> sqlplus / as sysdba SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Production on Mon Oct 11 07:16:32 2010 Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle. All Rights Reserved. Connected to an idle instance. SQL> exit Disconnected oracle@dwprdap01-> echo $ORACLE_HOME /oracle/product/asm oracle@dwprdap01-> exit kerbera@dwprdap01-> sudo su - oracle Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.10 Generic January 2005 You have mail. oracle@orap01-> echo $ORACLE_HOME /oracle/product/db oracle@orap01-> ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/product//asm oracle@orap01-> export ORACLE_HOME oracle@orap01-> PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH oracle@orap01-> export PATH oracle@orap01-> ORACLE_SID=+ASM oracle@orap01-> export ORACLE_SID oracle@orap01-> echo $ORACLE_HOME /oracle/product//asm oracle@orap01-> sqlplus / as sysdba SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Production on Mon Oct 11 07:19:05 2010 Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle. All Rights Reserved. Connected to: Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - 64bit Production With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options SQL> select instance_name from v$instance; INSTANCE_NAME ---------------- +ASM SQL> exit Disconnected from Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - 64bit Production With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options oracle@orap01-> echo $ORACLE_HOME /oracle/product//asm oracle@orap01-> -- Andrew W. Kerber 'If at first you dont succeed, dont take up skydiving.'