PRVF-4664 : Found inconsistent name resolution entries for SCAN name

This has proven to be a worthy adversary – “PRVF-4664 : Found inconsistent name resolution entries for SCAN name”. The error has been thrown at the end of a 11.2.0.1 Grid Infrastructure installation, during the cluster verification utility run. Some bloggers I checked recommended workarounds, but I wanted the solution.

Some facts first:

• Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11.2
• RHEL 5.4 32bit
• named 9.3.2
• GPnP (grid plug and play) enabled

The error message from the log was as follows:

INFO: Checking name resolution setup for "rac-scan.rac.the-playground.de"...
INFO: ERROR: 
INFO: PRVF-4664 : Found inconsistent name resolution entries for SCAN name 
INFO: "rac-scan.rac.the-playground.de"
INFO: Verification of SCAN VIP and Listener setup failed

I have scratched my head, browsed the Internet and came to a metalink note (887471.1) which didn’t help (I didn’t try to resolve the SCAN through /etc/hosts).

So something must have been wrong with the subdomain delegation for DNS. And in fact, once that had been rectified using a combination of rndc, dig and nslookup, the error went away. In short, if your /etc/resolv.conf points to your nameserver (not the GNS server), and you can resolve hostnames such as the scan as part of the subdomain, the error will go away.

I previously blogged about this, you can check the setup here:

https://martincarstenbach.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/build-your-own-11-2-rac-system-part-ii-dns-dhcp-for-gns/