Oracle 8i Agent Will Not Start - Event Viewer Logs appear

[jmbrink26]

Hi,

I was hoping you all could help me get this issue addressed that's been racking my brain. I've tried search all sorts of forum sites, Google, etc.., and have honestly got nowhere.

Here's my issue. The Oracle agent will not start on 2 of 3 of my servers. They are all running Oracle 8i on Windows 2000 Advanced. The only thing different is one of the servers has different hardware if that matters to you at all...

When attempting to start the service in Windows, you just get "OracleOraHome81Agent service failed to start on local computer..." and an oblivious hex code at the end. So I look in the Windows Event Viewer. Low and behold, there is an event in the Application logs. The event reads "Oracle agent failed to read/create queue file".

So from there I tried searching the internet from every source I could think of, and didn't get too far. All I got was some troubleshooting on the Agent not starting in general and it says to check the tnsnames.ora, listener.ora, etc... Of which are properly configured and running fine. The TNSListener service also runs fine.

The task I am trying to accomplish is to migrate the data out of Oracle 8i on all 3 of the Oracle DB servers and put them all in one SQL 2005 database. That in itself isn't a problem. The problem is the fact that I cannot get the databases to open. When opening svrmgrl, or even using SQL Plus, and try running a simple select query, etc... all I get is Oracle Unavailable.

Thank you in advance for all your help.

[PAVB]

I'm having issues trying to follow you.

When you say "Oracle 8i agent"... are your referring to OracleServiceYOURSID Windows service?

On the other hand tnsnames.ora and listener.ora are configuration files,they are not supposed to be "running fine".

Has ever this database started properly on the offendig box?
What do you see in alertlog?

[jmbrink26]

Well after reading about the agent, the agent I am referring to the Intelligent Agent, in which because of the name that was given to the Oracle Home directory, OraHome81, so the name of the agent is OracleOraHome81Agent.

And yes, I am referring to the Windows Service.

But after looking at this on one of the affected servers, and looking more into the agent I realized that the agent was only for usage of MIB's for SNMP traps, so I don't think the issue in itself has nothing to do with the Oracle Unavailable error. But rather, the Oracle Unavailable error that shows up after connecting to a database using connect internal, is its own issue.

So I guess I really need to figure out why this happens more so...

Now one interesting thing I found, was one of the servers I tried to connect to the DB, and then issue the alter user... command and it worked fine, which made me realize I have been troubleshooting the wrong issue...

So now where I'm at, is on one server, I'm getting the Oracle Unavailable error, the other I am getting errors that the service name could not be found, or it cannot open the database. When trying an alter database open on that server for the affected DB's, it says it isn't mounted. So I say "startup force pfile=PATH/init.ora". But then it keeps saying it cannot be mounted in exclusive mode. I've ran into that before, but was able to get it addressed after doing "shutdown immediate" and then the "startup force pfile...". So not sure why that isn't working for me this time...

[PAVB]

You are experiencing two different issues, don't think there is a silver bullet that would solve both of them.

Pick one and provide detailed scenario and troubleshooting information.

[jmbrink26]

LOL

Yes, I now realize this is two different issues.

The real issue I am concerned with is the ORA-01034: ORACLE not available error.

After realizing that the Event Viewer and Agent issue doesn't really matter, because these servers are going to be decom'd as soon as I get the data out of these DB's, so SNMP doesn't matter on these servers anyway...

So, as far as the ORA-01034 error, I just can't seem to figure out what the deal is with the error. Now here is some background that might help get some light shined on this.

So basically these servers were running in their own environment, not on a domain, or necessarily on a workgroup for that matter. They just had the assignment of the default WORKGROUP workgroup name. Well I thought it would be more seamless to add one of these servers to a domain, so I added it to my AD domain, which of course changed the DNS entries in the tnsnames and listener files. Well that ended up causing more problems than it was worth, so I took off the domain. Since then, I have changed the values in the tnsnames and listener, but I get the ORA-01034 error on every single database on this server now, and I can't figure out why.

Now, on this other server that's having the same issue per se, I can open and mount one of the databases, but the rest of them just give me the same ORA-01034. Now, I have not changed the DNS on this server at all. In regards to that service not found, I actually figured out what the issue was after looking at the tnsnames and listener on that a few more times, and realized someone decided they'd comment out that service name in both files. I uncommented that and the other one out, and it was fine in that regards. But once I was able to connect to it, low and behold, another ORA-01034.

Now, I know this has got to be something I'm missing here in the equation that is causing this, but I just can't put my finger on it. So knowing that on one server, that the ORA-01034 only happens on some DB's while it doesn't on others, tells me that Oracle itself is running is I expected, but it's rather an issue initializing the individual database itself.

Thanks again for your help.

[PAVB]

ORA-01034 means offending Oracle instances are not startup.

Here is how it works. On Windows environment there is one OracleServiceYOURSID service for each Oracle instance on the box.

Check Windows Services OracleServiceYOURSID for each offending SID, if down start it/them up.

In an extreme case you may want to delete/recreate OracleService* services using ORADIM utility, commands should looks something like:

oradim -delete -sid YOURSID
oradim -new -sid YOURSID -intpwd PASSWORD -startmode AUTO -pfile drive:\completepath\initYOURSID.ora