OracleDoc gave me a great idea (in that 'why RAC' thread) that I had not thought about. Taking my standby database and using that for creating a clone!

What am I missing here? I shutdown the standby and scp all the files (online redo, control included) from standby box to qa box - essentially a cold backup copy, rename the instance and opening. Perhap use 9i feature to rename the database (or am i confusing the DBID?). And I'm done.

The standby is 563.15 KMs from production and 'on the wire' with qa and dev.