AM71 and backup causing corruption

BackupExec and Oracle does not work well together. At least when not configured correctly.

I was working on an RSA SecurID Autentication Manager 7.1 installation that stopped each night.

Symptom

In the <servername>_server.log I found this error message:

java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01034: ORACLE not available
ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist
 

Cause

After looking around for a while I got a hold of TOAD and started to look into the data in the Oracle server. When I tried to dig in to the data I got an error message about the data files. That made me find this excellent blog post about Oracle data files that gets into RECOVER mode because of backup related issues.

By following the steps explained there I made the server work again.

If you need to obtain the Oracle sys password, read here.