Cold Backup RMAN Fun and Games

Here's an RMAN oddity.  If anyone could explain it, I'd be grateful.

We were moving a database to a new server.  Same OS, same version of Oracle (10.2.0.4).  The database is in Archivelog mode, but to keep things easy, we decided to do an offline, consistent backup.

So, we shutdown the database, then mounted it and performed an RMAN backup to a flash_recovery_area on a shared NFS filesystem:

backup device type disk database plus archivelog include current controlfile;

The backup worked fine. So we logged on to the new server, made sure that we could see the NFS-mounted FRA, and issued the Duplicate command.

run {
allocate channel d1 type disk;
allocate channel d2 type disk;
allocate channel d3 type disk;
allocate channel d4 type disk;
allocate auxiliary channel da1 type disk;
allocate auxiliary channel da2 type disk;
allocate auxiliary channel da3 type disk;
allocate auxiliary channel da4 type disk;
duplicate target database to CATDB;
}

Oddly, it didn't work.  It returned an error saying that a backup could not be found.

Starting restore at 20-MAY-11

released channel: da1
released channel: da2
released channel: da3
released channel: da4
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of Duplicate Db command at 20/05/2011 15:25:38
RMAN-03015: error occurred in stored script Memory Script
RMAN-06026: some targets not found - aborting restore
RMAN-06100: no channel to restore a backup or copy of datafile 1
RMAN-06100: no channel to restore a backup or copy of datafile 2
etc...

If we tried using automatic channel allocations for the restore, it still did not find our disk backup, but tried restoring older tape backups.  Not what we wanted.

So, we tried backing it up again.  Backing up just the archivelogs.  Just the database.  Nada!  The same error every time we tried to Duplicate.

In desperation, I tried opening up our original DB and running an online backup.  Luckily the database was small and the backup quick.  I then shut it down and re-mounted to prevent the users from changing anything.

This time, upon trying the Duplicate command (this time with an "until sequence" inserted) it all worked as expected!

So it looks like a wee bug.  If you've got a database in Archivelog mode, but you perform an offline backup, RMAN seems to get confused and have trouble deciding which backups to restore.

We know it's not a general problem with offline backups, as we've duplicated DBs in Noarchivelog mode on this system before.