RMAN config and script question

Well thanks for the help last week. I have my RMAN backups happening and I have cron scripts that copy the backups to another host for redundancy since they dont have tape drives at this company.

2 Questions

1) I reach out to the destination and clear the previous nights copy of backups with the following:

ssh oracle@standby << CMDS
rm /ora/backup/blprimary/bje/*.bak
CMDS >

Although it completes, it blows up returning 'bad file number' which is some ssh debug output. But since it clears the directory I just put it into a sub-script and call it from the cron script and the cron script continues merrily. Is anybody familiar with this ssh problem on solaris?

2) I think rman/repository/OEM is nice when you have 100 machines to backup, good to have a master console. But for this shop with 5 boxes I am feeling that a repository is a just another point of failure. Academically it sounds great but in practice I dont like having it there. I am thinking of using simple rman control file backups. Can anyone school me on why this would be a bad decision? OEM emails are kind of nice....

Thanks for the help, next week I am moving on to fixing their Data Guard pairs....then I can relax.

Love the new job, good to be back in the game and not on the sidelines.

:)

1) - You can try putting your commands in a shell script on the remote host, and then run it with ssh:

/path-to-bin/ssh oracle@standby pato-to-file/file.sh

Also I guess you already allowed the login w/o password with autorized_keys?

2) - Even for 5 databases, I don't see why not using RMAN repository? The size of the database is small ( 50 Mb) and you need to take a full db export to have it backup. Even if it crashes, you will have a day to import it on another instance and have the nightly backups running again. The good thing, I like about RMAN is that once you have the backup scripts - it doesn't matter which OS the db is runinng on....


Hope that helps,

clio_usa

OCP 8/8i/9i DBA

Thanks for your help I am going to see what capabilities I lose when doing control-file rman backups vs repository. Righ now I have both flavors and some connectivity issues to the repository, plus concerned about another point of failure which you addressed well.

My errors from the embedded or unattended ssh were cause by the following tty lines on the destination host..

#stty istrip
#stty erase '^h'

No adverse effects so going with these two commented out.