ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

We had one of our RAC Node crashed and all databases shutdown and as usual they should come back once the ASM is up.

But this one database would not start at all.

Grepping for PMON for that database returns nothing:

So, trying to start manually:

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.2.0 Production on Mon May 27 04:55:22 2013

Copyright (c) 1982, 2010, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Connected to an idle instance.

SQL> startup
ORA-32004: obsolete or deprecated parameter(s) specified for RDBMS instance
ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

Now that is weird, why would I get that? /dev/shm has no space? Really? but why? database is not started yet to utilize that!!!!

Grepping for database name gives me:

db2:11.2.0:node2:/opt/oracle>ps -ef |grep db2
oracle     493     1  0 Apr28 ?        00:00:00 oracledb2 (LOCAL=NO)
oracle   24841     1  0 04:51 ?        00:00:00 oracledb2 (DESCRIPTION=(LOCAL=YES)(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=beq)))
oracle   24846     1  0 04:51 ?        00:00:00 oracledb2 (DESCRIPTION=(LOCAL=YES)(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=beq)))
oracle   31322 26885  0 05:02 pts/1    00:00:00 grep db2
oracle   32553     1  0 Apr28 ?        00:00:00 oracleras2 (LOCAL=NO)

Hmm... I get nothing when I grep for PMON but there is still something running in the backgroud as hung process!!!

Time to kill those process...
db2:node2:/opt/oracle>kill -9 493 24841 24846 32553

Now do startup and database comes up without any complaints...