Hi All,

Since we upgraded from Oracle 7.3.4 to 8.1.7 the backup script I have written will not work as a cron job under the oracle8 user (Tru 64 4.0f), yet if I run the script manually logged in as the oracle8 user it works fine ! I just cannot find a solution to this and hope somebody out there can shed some light.

I have spoken to a DBA colleague of mine and he has seen this error occur if the oracle8 environment variables are not specified in the backup script, but I have checked and checked the env variables and they are all thier.

Anyway when the backup script runs as a cron job I get the following error the first time I try to connect to the database using server manager:

EXP-00056: ORACLE error 12571 encountered
ORA-12571: TNSacket writer failure
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I have written into the backup script to check to make sure that both the tns listener and the oracle instance are both up and they are ! so what am I missing ???? The only thing I can think of is that in my tnsnames.ora file I had specified the server name + domain suffix rather then an IP address, I have changed this but have not yet had a chance to shutdown and restart the listener and instances to test my theory out. Does anybody know if a cronjob can translate DNS names ?? Its a long shot but I am now shooting in the dark with this problem !!!!