separate owner/ORACLE_HOME for crs, ASM, and database in RAC environment

Hi, List,

I am testing to setup a 2-node RAC environment with separate owner/ORACLE_HOME for crs, ASM, and database, it's 10gR2 on Redhat AS 4.

2 users are created: oracle and oraclex, oracle owns clusterware home and ASM home, oraclex owns database home.

first, I login as oracle and installed clusterware and database software (in 2 different oracle home of course), configured and started ASM instance, everything worked fine.

second, I login as oraclex and installed database software, then I tried to create a database using dbca, but I ran into error when I chose ASM as my database storage, the error is:
"DBCA could not startup the ASM instance configured on this node. To proceed with database creation using ASM you need the ASM instance to be up and running. Do you want to recreate the ASM instance on this node?"

But the ASM instance IS already running. I am guessing this must be because of some permission issue but I am not sure what I am missing. I have oracle and oraclex both have "oinstall" as primary group and "dba" as second group.

I googled but cannot find any useful information. Can anybody give me some suggestion? Any comment would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
-Li

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