Re: All Recent Backups Appear "EXPIRED" through RMAN

On Oct 18, 1:06 pm, Jerome Vitalis
<vitalismanN05..._at_gmail.com.invalid> wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:29:46 -0700, sillz wrote:
> > I ran a modified version of the run block you gave me. I had to
> > allocate a channel for maintenance first. All results come back
> > expired. This is really perplexing.
>
> > I'm wondering now if I should just do my backups from RMAN instead of
> > Backup Exec.
>
> > Here's the output of the commands.
> > ...
>
> This really seems to be a problem with the BackupExec agent or its
> configuration. I cannot try helping you any further since I don't have
> any knowledge on this product.
>
> I think you're right: you should temporarily take the next RMAN backups
> to disks (and then to tapes) since you're not sure of the reliability of
> the BackupExec agent.
> Meanwhile I hope the BackupExec support service can sort this mess out
> for you.
>
> Jerome

Jerome was correct. This ended up being an ugly problem with Backup Exec. The first attempt to restore an Oracle 9i database to a new host works some of the time. 8 out of 10 of our tests failed on the first try. Subsequent tries on at least 2 of our Oracle on Windows systems fail because of some bug in BUExec. The database is not accessible through the BUE GUI. When we attempted to use RMAN, the problem is that all backups immediately expire.

When we remove BUE from the the core of the process, it works fine.

We ended up doing the following:

Native backups to disk using RMAN.
Archiving to tape the backup set files, autobackup of controlfile, init.ora, sqlnet.ora and listener.or. We used a flat file backup in BUE for this.
Recover all of the flat files and backup set files to the new host using BUE.
Restoring using Native RMAN.

I'd be curious to know if anyone out there using BUE 11g and Oracle on Windows is having the same problem.

Symantec re-created the issue in their lab, but we haven't heard from them in over a week. A colleague also replicated the issue in his lab.

If you're using BUExec 11g, Oracle and Windows, then I'd check and double-check your restore procedures.

Hopefully you don't have the same problem we had.

Beth Received on Mon Oct 29 2007 - 13:01:26 CDT