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Recently I decided to bring up an Oracle instance on a Linux box as a personal project.  I had two goals, one was to finally spend some hands-on time with Linux and the other was to see what it takes to use Oracle's ASM.  Eventually I'll use this knowledge to bring up a 2nd box to create a RAC environment (for no reason other than I want to).

I have no experience with Linux but over the years I have worked with a variety of *nix's.  I had no experience with ASM.  I followed the very nice install guide written by John Smiley  and everything went smooth.  The story should pretty much end here, but I guess I wanted too much and decided to set up Oracle to start automatically when the server starts.  Out of all the tasks this should have been the easiest but instead turned into a case study on poor implementation and documentation.

There is a 2nd part to this article called Oracle ASM & RHEL 5 Startup Basics which I suggest you read because it fills in some critical pieces of information that helps you understand the answer.  However, for those of you in a hurry I'll give you the steps you need after the installs are all done.  This example assumes that we want everything to auto-start in run levels 3 and 5.  It also assumes that we should always do protective shutdowns (shutdown nicely just in case).