PRKO-2007

This quirk is really nice, it's telling me that i'm getting too old for this job...

I was working on a 10gR2 RAC instance and i needed to stop it:

srvctl stop instance -d orclrsrv1 -i orclsrv11
PRKO-2007 : Invalid instance name: orclsrv11

I could not believe to my eyes, i did the same dozens of times already, so i double checked the statement and reentered it.
Same error!

So i decided to stop the rac altogether, as it was a test environment in the end and nobody was connected...

srvctl stop database -d orclsrv1

then i tried restarting the instance:

srvctl start instance -d orclsrv1 -i orclsrv11 -o mount

and all went ok this time.

So i figured out that there must be something really odd in that statement, i summoned a colleague and asked him to look at the two statements and tell me what's the difference.
He quickly came up with the solution:

srvctl stop instance -d orclrsrv1 -i orclsrv11

I had typed a wrong database name, however the service control was complaining about the instance name that was correct in the end, so i completely overlooked the first parameter!

So the bottom line of the story is:
1. it's time to buy glasses
2. don't put your faith in the error messages, they can be misleading...