ASM appears to be running, but connect via sqlplus, says idle instance.??

Hello all.

I've just installed Clusterware on 5 nodes...I have an ASM volume that so far only contains the voting disk and OCR.

I'm wanting to configure my Enterprise GRID management to monitor all the soon to be databases, as well as the current ASM. I'm wanting to get into the ASM instance(s), and enable the ASMSNMP user and set its password.

But something puzzling is happening.

Looking at the listener there...it shows ASM is up.

Services Summary...
Service "+ASM" has 1 instance(s).
Instance "+ASM1", status READY, has 1 handler(s) for this service...
The command completed successfully

I'm working from node1.

Looking at srvctl...it shows ASM is up on all nodes.

[oracle@node1~]$ srvctl status asm
ASM is running on node1,node2,node3,node4,node5

However, I can't seem to log on with sqlplus and see it working.

I've tried both:

export ORACLE_SID=+ASM1

and
export ORACLE_SID=+ASM

Then using sqlplus /nolog:

SQL> connect / as sysdba
Connected to an idle instance.

Now....why is this showing me as an idle instance?!!? Am I missing something here?

Thank you,

Kelly

ps. this is all Oracle 11Gr2...on RHEL5

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I came across a similar problem recently, ASM was running and SID set correctly. Turned out I had an extra slash '/' in my $ORACLE_HOME which for some reason causes sqlplus to not work as expected. Read more here:
http://blogs.portrix-systems.de/brost/revenge-of-the-double-slash/
FROM: https://community.oracle.com/message/4525211