Logon Failure to Oracle R12 EBS in 11gR2 RAC Environment and Solution

By Ben Prusinski

While working on a four node Oracle 11gR2 RAC environment with Oracle R12 eBusiness Suite, I encountered a weird login authentication error when I tried to open a few forms to manage concurrent processing as system administrator:

"Cannot Complete Application logon. You may have entered an invalid applications password or there may have been a database connect error."

I checked the password by logging into the database tier with the apps account and that worked. Then I searched on My Oracle Support and found more clues to help me solve the issue.

Starting Forms Intermittently Raises "Cannot Complete Applications Logon" and "APP-FND-01496" Error When Using RAC [ID 753028.1]

Sure enough, when I logged into the Oracle 11gR2 RAC cluster nodes and checked for their time, they were out of sync! So, we had to configure ntpd (Network Time Protocol Daemon) and restart the cluster nodes. Here is what is puzzling- with 11gR2, there is a new process called the CTSSD or Cluster Time Synchronization Service Daemon which is supposed to replace the functionality of NTPD. However, you still need to run NTPD to have RAC function in 11gR2 without complaining. Also, NTPD is required to some extent to maintain a time synchronization with the Oracle RAC nodes. Once we re-synched the clocks for the Oracle 11gR2 RAC hosts, we were able to resolve the forms login errors with our Oracle R12 eBusiness Suite and RAC environment.