We installed 11.2.0.1 RAC on a RHEL 5.3 two-node cluster successfully. It looks like SCAN (Single Client Access Name) must be assigned during installation. We have a company-wide OID to serve DB connection strings for thousands of clients. Each entry has load_balance=yes. It works very well. We're OK with continuing to use long strings (i.e. multiple address lines for each OID entry). Therefore we don't think SCAN provides benefit for our environment. Can anybody think of any risk or loss of benefit we haven't thought of? Is there any way to completely bypass it, not even bothering our DNS admin to create an entry (one or three A records)? If not during installation, can I stop the SCAN listener and shutdown its network interface (if I can) and remove it from OCR? Oracle says SCAN is optional unless you use policy-managed database in 11gR2. But it actually becomes mandatory at the time of installation, and then it can be optional afterward. Isn't that awkward? Yong Huang -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l