RMAN maintenance commands sent to the Oracle Plugin hang indefinitely (4043352)

When running RMAN CLI maintenance commands against backups stored in NVBU (i.e. SBT_TAPE), these hang indefinitely until the NetVault services are stopped.

Some of these commands are: 'DELETE BACKUP', 'DELETE OBSOLETE' , 'CATALOG device type 'SBT_TAPE''...

A channel to device type 'SBT_TAPE' must have been allocated first, or else these commands will succeed as they will run against the DISK device type (FRA).

Example:

RMAN> allocate channel for maintenance device type sbt;

allocated channel: ORA_MAINT_SBT_TAPE_2
channel ORA_MAINT_SBT_TAPE_2: SID=51 device type=SBT_TAPE
channel ORA_MAINT_SBT_TAPE_2: Quest NetVault Backup Plug-in for Oracle v.6.1.4

RMAN> delete backup;

....this will hang.

Note:

The 'CROSSCHECK BACKUP' command may be the only one to succeeds when allocating a channel to SBT_TAPE.