Good golly this should not be that hard. I have two 2 node rac databases, RAC1 and PROD. RAC1 works fine, created at install. I create PROD manually. I can start and stop the database with srvctl fine, tns entries for RAC1 match PROD. When I check services for listener I see a service for PROD. Everything is the same so far. So perhaps I need to create a service "srvctl add service -d PROD -s PROD -r PROD1" OK, tried that, no dice, should service name include domain in order to match tns? Anyway, one I am posting because this has always been too complex, Oracle you need to make this easier. Two, can someone point me to a decent doc/page which I can use to try to debug the actual issue. Unfortunately error "ORA-12514" is just way too common and my searches have not turned up what I am looking for. One more buggy looking thing I did, I actually have database instances "PROD and PROD2" and my service is going to also be PROD. Hope that doesn't mess anything up but I converted the DB into ASM from a stand alone database and didn't have time to figure out how to change the name to PROD1.