Today a customer highlighted me a nice-to-know. If you add a new virtual machine to an exadata ovm cluster, he experienced something odd. It was tested on a “new installation”, so it worked good. Basic steps are:

• Run over OEDA and add the cluster
• move the xml-files to the dom0 on the same spot as the original one
• run install.sh with this config

As this is a good customer he followed the advice of having all passwords changed. The bad thing is … while running install.sh lots of errors on different components where thrown.
The most remarkable, and even the first one thrown, was:

So after digging around for a while, it turned out that it was due to the “non-default” passwords for root and celladmin.
After changing the root and celladmin passwords back the the wellknown default, the install.sh liked it and gave the expected success message.

The IB switches suffer from this as well. But that’s only faced if you are going to upgrade the IB software. So in order to patch them easily, just temporarily reset the passwords to the default and change them back afterwards.