11.5.3 clone connects to source (Production)

Last night, I got a call from Sadiq regarding an issue with a clone of 11.5.3 instance. As you may recall, all instances pre-11.5.5 were not autoconfig enabled. That means manual cloning. For this clone, Sadiq had followed a document which had painstakingly mentioned each and every file to be manually modified. It was not the Oracle supported method of cloning where you need to do a fresh install of 11.5.3 on target and then start the cloning. After the cloning, he noticed that when you clicked Connect on ICXINDEX.htm, it would take you to the Production instance (Source instance) instead of the target instance. One more thing which was peculiar was that the Cloned instance was using the same instance name and mountpoints as production, but was on a different hostname. After a search on metalink and some logical thinking, I concluded that something was wrong with the DAD. I checked the wdbsvr.app file which was present in $APPL_TOP/iAS/Apache/modplsql/cfg directory. However everything was ok in it. Then I realized that since the instance name of source and production were same, there would be no difference in the DAD entries. The difference had to be in the tnsnames.ora entry which should refer to the the target instance instead of source. Sure enough the $APPL_TOP/iAS/network/admin/tnsnames.ora file was pointing to the source instance. After it was corrected to point to target instance, we tested again but FND_WEB.PING was still showing source insance. I asked Sadiq to stop Apache clear Apache cache present in $OA_HTML/_pages directory and restart Apache. Once that was done, FND_WEB.PING was pointing to the target instance. The problem was solved.

This may have been a well known problem in the heyday of 11.5.3 but doesn't get any ready hits on metalink now. We must remember that there all still many production instances which belong to pre-autoconfig era.