DBCA Slow? Check Host Equivalence.

Heh – just ran into an all-too-familiar “duuh” situation. I was launching DBCA to update a few settings on some services in a test database and it was taking …f…o…r…e…v…e…r… to run.

It must have spent a minute on this partially updated screen. Now I haven’t launched DBCA in a week or so on this machine… and it is a vmware-based test cluster so it’s a bit slow anyway… but this just seemed excessive.

So I jumped into another window and typed “ps” to see what running. Lo and behold, here’s what I see:

[oracle@rh4lab15 ~]$ ps axf
  PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
    1 ?        S      0:06 init [3]                                             
    2 ?        SN     0:00 [ksoftirqd/0]
    3 ?        S<     0:02 [events/0]
    4 ?        S<     0:00  _ [khelper]
    5 ?        S<     0:00  _ [kacpid]
   20 ?        S<     0:02  _ [kblockd/0]
   30 ?        S      0:00  _ [pdflush]
   31 ?        S      0:19  _ [pdflush]
   33 ?        S<     0:00  _ [aio/0]
  203 ?        S<     0:00  _ [kmirrord]
  204 ?        S<     0:00  _ [kmir_mon]
 1727 ?        S<     0:00  _ [kauditd]
   21 ?        S      0:00 [khubd]
     [...]
 2768 pts/1    S      0:08 Xvnc :2 -desktop rh4lab15.lab.ardentperf.com:2 (oracl
 2828 pts/1    S      0:00 vncconfig -iconic
 2829 pts/1    S      0:00 xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title rh4lab15.lab.a
 2854 pts/2    Ss     0:00  _ -bash
 3454 pts/2    S+     0:00      _ /bin/sh -f /u10/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_
 3455 pts/2    Sl+    1:05          _ /u10/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/jdk/j
 9047 pts/2    S+     0:00              _ /usr/bin/rsh rh4lab16 /bin/true
 2830 pts/1    S      0:00 twm
 5213 ?        Ss     0:01 ora_pz99_db2rac11
 8920 pts/1    S      0:00 xterm
 8935 pts/3    Ss     0:00  _ bash
 9179 pts/3    R+     0:00      _ ps axf
 9093 ?        Ss     0:00 ora_q002_db2rac11

Duuh!! This just arose from the common practice of putting a password on the ssh key when configuring host equivalence. Of course this is what you should be doing; it’s a best practice and it’s even spelled out in the RAC install guide… but it’s easy to forget that once you set it up you have to enable user equivalency before running DBCA anytime at all. Not just an install-time thing. I’m sure a few people will find sneaky ways to integrate it into their login scripts but that isn’t a good general practice.

Naturally, as soon as I enabled the host equavalence everything was back to normal.

[oracle@rh4lab15 ~]$ exec ssh-agent $SHELL
[oracle@rh4lab15 ~]$ ssh-add 
Enter passphrase for /u10/app/oracle/.ssh/id_rsa: 
Identity added: /u10/app/oracle/.ssh/id_rsa (/u10/app/oracle/.ssh/id_rsa)
Identity added: /u10/app/oracle/.ssh/id_dsa (/u10/app/oracle/.ssh/id_dsa)
[oracle@rh4lab15 ~]$ dbca

I know this is kinda obvious but I thought I’d post it anyway. Hope it helps some googler someday. :)