Unable to attach to ORACLE_ACME/XYZ. NEWFS_MAX_SERVER_CONNECTIONS

I am fairly new at Oracle administration so bear with me. We have been using Veritas Backup Exec (BE) 7.30 and the Oracle agent to backup an Oracle 8.1.5 db. The oracle system resides on an NT 4.0 sp6a OS with a Compaq raid5 disk system. The backup occurs nightly and has been successful for quite some time. There have been no recent changes to the system, and Compaq Insight Manager and the NT event logs do not report any unusual events. In the last few days, however, the backup job has failed with the following message:

"Unable to attach to ORACLE_ACME/XYZ. NEWFS_MAX_SERVER_CONNECTIONS"
(where ACME is the server name and XYZ is the SID name)

Veritas has a technote for this error and the solution listed is "This error will occur if a backup job of an Oracle database is initiated while the database is already in backup mode".

I did note in review of the xyzalrt.log that the following commands are normally issued during the backup:
ALTER TABLESPACE XYZ BEGIN BACKUP
 COMPLETED.<snip>..
ALTER TABLESPACE XYZ END BACKUP
 COMPLETED.. However the day this started happening the "end backup" command never showed up in the alrt.log for the tablespace in question.

I could not figure out how to tell from my Oracle tools if the database was truly "in backup mode". I therefore issued a sql sommand
"alter tablespace xyz end backup" which was processed.

However I then attempted a test backup with BE and got the same error again. I have also restarted the instance and the server as suggested by Veritas, and still get the same error.

Any help would be appreciated.

Glen Moffitt
glen.moffitt_at_homestreetbank.com Received on Thu Oct 04 2001 - 12:37:04 CDT