ORA-19506: failed to create sequential file
Many people run Oracle RMAN scripts from crontab and an OS shell script. We prefer to run all of our RMAN backups via OEM and the database scheduler instead of from a specific server or instance. There are many benefits OEM/database scheduler backups a few of which are:
- Centralized administration makes it easy to manage 100′s of databases
- Database affinity means that backups run even if a server crashes
- OEM monitors the output of the RMAN and can alert the DBA if there are errors
One thing that we have noticed is that when we used our OS (server) RMAN shell scripts we had a string similar to the following:
send ‘NB_ORA_CLIENT=gmrac1
This parameter is optional for Networker and is used to assist Networker with recovery operations to alternate servers.
Occasionally, the RMAN would fail for no immediately obvious reason. On closer inspection we saw Networker was timing out while connecting to the target server. Everytime the database RMAN job was launched from gmrac1 it would succeed. However when it was run from any other server in the cluster the job would fail with the following:
RMAN-03009: failure of backup command on ch0 channel at 02/05/2009 16:51:46
ORA-19506: failed to create sequential file, name=”mqk6k505_1_1″, parms=”"
ORA-27028: skgfqcre: sbtbackup returned error
ORA-19511: Error received from media manager layer, error text: VxBSACreateObject: Failed with error: Server Status: Communication with the server has not been iniatated or the server status has not been retrieved from the server.
[sic]
The fix was to remove the optional parameter NB_ORA_CLIENT=gmrac1 and let Networker do the right thing. For reference, our broken RMAN script is shown below:
run {
sql ‘alter system archive log current’;
allocate channel ch0 type ‘SBT_TAPE’;
send ‘NB_ORA_CLIENT=gmrac1,NB_ORA_POLICY=PROD_ora,
NB_ORA_SERV=backup.betterlogic.com’;
backup
tag “prod_archivelogs_only”
archivelog all not backed up;
delete noprompt archivelog until time ‘sysdate -2′ backed up 1 times to ‘SBT_TAPE’;
release channel ch0;}
