Oracle bug 4401119 for AIX database crashes with ORA-221, ORA-206, ORA-202, ORA-27072

Bug 4401119 AIX: crash possible on AIX (ORA-206)

This bug is marked as an important issue.

Affects:

Product (Component)	Oracle Server (RDBMS)
Range of versions believed to be affected	Versions <11
Versions confirmed as being affected	· 10.1.0.2 · 10.1.0.3 · 10.1.0.4 · 10.2.0.1
Platforms Affected	· IBM aix5l based systems (64bit)

Fixed:

This issue is fixed in	· 10.1.0.5 (server patch set) · 10.2.0.2 (server patch set) · 11.1.0.6 (Base Release)
Symptoms:		Related:
· Error may occur · Upload uption · Instance may crash ORA-206/ORA-27072		· (None specified)

 

Applies:

Oracle Server-Enterprise Edition-version: 10.1.0.2 to 10.1.0.4, 10.2.0.1
Aix5l based systems (64-bit)

Purpose

Alert users to possible database crashes with error 221 unable to write to controlfile on AIX 5l. The error stack that is generated is:

ORA-00221: Error on write to controlfile
ORA-00206: Error in writing (Block 3, # Blocks 1) of controlfile
ORA-00202: controlfile: '/U03/oradata/mg/control03.ctl'
ORA-27072: file I/O error.
Ibm aix risc system/6000 error: 22: invalid argument
Additional information: 7

Scope and application

This problem is specific to Oracle 10g on AIX 5l.

Database crashes with ORA-221, ORA-206, ORA-202, ORA-27072

Impact:

The database impact is severe since it causes the database to crash. In addition this error is usually the result of a resource
Exhaustion. So once it is encountered it is more than likely that this problem will be encountered again on the Production
System.

Workaround:

None. However the default server settings for AIX are:

Minimum number of servers [1]
Maximum number of servers per CPU [100]
Maximum number of requests [4096]
 
This problem is improved slightly by changing the above values to something like:

Minimum number of servers (minservers) [64]
Maximum number of servers per CPU (maxservers) [256]
Maximum number of requests (maxreqs) [8192]

Solution:

Apply patch for Bug 4401119

References

BUG: 4401119-database down with controlfile failed uption