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Title
Oracle backups hang indefinitely allocating channel or may fail with RMAN-04004 and ORA-12154 -
Description
Oracle jobs submited from the NVBU GUI hang indefintely until they are aborted.
In Job Management the job status shows "Allocating channels...."
In some cases the jobs may fail with RMAN-04004 and ORA-12154.The NVBU logs and trace show the Oracle APM is started successfully on the Oracle server.
The job options are received from the Oracle APM and the RMAN script is passed onto RMAN, but no other activity is recorded after that.Running backups and restores directly from the RMAN CLI is succesful suggesting the issue is on the NVBU side.
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Cause
When Oracle jobs are submited from the NVGUI, the Oracle APM creates RMAN scripts out of the GUI options then connects to RMAN and runs the scripts.
Comparing the working CLI RMAN run{} statement with the one provided by NVBU, we can see that the only difference is an attempt to connect to a recovery.
Examination of the Oracle APM configuration (right click database > Edit Database > RMAN Details),
reveals that the "Use Catalog for RMAN Based Backups" option was enabled while there is no Catalog on site. -
Resolution
When there are GUI Oracle backup jobs hung, there are several steps that can be taken in order to troubleshoot the issue:
- The first port of call would be to test a RMAN CLI backup and see if it also hangs. If it does hang, we know the issue is not only caused by NetVault.
Oracle alert and trc logs should be examined.
- If the RMAN CLI job succeeds, compare the RMAN script generated by NVBU with the successful RMAN CLI job to spot differences.
The RMAN scripts run from NVBU GUI jobs can be clearly seen in the NetVault logs for the job.
- Go over the Oracle APM configuration especially the RMAN details to make sure there are no typos or mistakes.
The above issue can be seen:
> when the user has configured the use of a recovery catalog with erroneous details
> or specified a catalog when there is none used for this database