achivelog strange behaviour of archiver

HiYa

having a strange thing happen on a linux machine that I set up and got Oracle running on.

I had set it up, to run and test archive log operation, and generally mucked about with it for a while, getting to understand what I was doing and learning on. Based on this I then set up the environments on another machine and all are running as I understand they should.

Then I came back to the first machine, and tried to test my backup scripts, and found that it does not operate as I expect (while the other machine does)

Eg

with the database in ARCHIVELOG mode
(select log_mode from v$database) and with the archiver process going

(manually started with alter system archive log start)
I can see process called ora_lgwr_$ORACLE_SID and ora_arc0_$ORACLE_SID

and with the entries in init$ORACLE_SID.ora

	log_archive_dest = "/u01/app/oracle/admin/DEV/arch"
	log_archive_format = arch_%t_%s.arc 
	background_dump_dest = /u01/app/oracle/admin/DEV/bdump
	user_dump_dest = /u01/app/oracle/admin/DEV/udump

I would have thought that I was home and hosed. BUT

when I issue a command

        alter system switch logfile;

from sqlplus I get a file placed in $oracle_home/dbs/ called (for example) arch1_93.dbf

fushigi da naaa!!

not only is the location odd, but also the name, as the name does not have the leading _ before the %t attribute

strangely enough when I do the above on the other linux machine I get the file placed into the log_archive_dest location

also just now, I noticed that log_archive_dest has "" surrounding the value but user_dump_dest and background_dump_dest do not.

this is the same on the machine that works as I expected

any suggestions welcome

(Ohhh ... to all those who have given me answerers and advice so far
thankyou very much it has been a very interesting 2 weeks of learning and I feel that I am just at the stage where I can be genuinely dangerous if let loose without a leash ... another year and I may be a DBA ;-)

thanks again folks Received on Thu Feb 07 2002 - 23:34:09 CST