Helpful Hints for RMAN Recovery
When you copy your backup files onto disk for RMAN to use for practicing cold-metal restore/recovery, make sure that they are at least visible to the oracle OS user. It doesn’t help to have them owned by root with perm 640.
Thank me later.
Well done, Don. :) I find, as a general rule of thumb, you should check any mount or file that you have the Unix admin restore/create/mount as it will save you lots of time in the long run. I have seen this phenomenon in multiple shops :)
Bradd Piontek
May 7, 2008 at 9:55 am
I put stuff out on to some mysterious pizza box (probably running some bsd, the idea is to present files to both windows and hp-ux) to get it away from my production machines – after all, who uses tape any more. Recently it lost some disks and the damager put in a new disk and ran whatever mysterious recovery it does. All came back… except much of the protection and ownership was xor’d like
——-rwx or -rwx—rwx where previously it had been -rwx—— or -rwxrwx—. That’s right, world writeable but not user readable. And beyond that, it seemed to have funny ideas about what root is allowed to do as it is displaying via NFS on my production machines. So they bought a new pizza box.
Of course, the ownership issues became very complicated as the Oracle user has a different userid with different production boxes. So at one point I had to create a new user so I could be the xor’d oracle, root or various other users and change the ownership and permissions…
It had me frightened at first as I was seeing “directory unreadable” so much, even as root, after successfully writing new backups as RMAN/oracle, on the new box where I had copied everything from the old one… it took some admin head scratching on the new box to get this all straight. I miss the days when root was superuser.
joel garry
May 7, 2008 at 6:20 pm