Oracle 19.33 behaviour changes may impact your Oracle RMAN Backups!

Oracle Release Update 19.33 fixes a number of issues and also introduces a behaviour change which could potentially impact your Oracle RMAN backups. This change brings it in-line with Oracle AI Database 26ai, and addresses an operational security risk.

Behavior change: You must now use a secure external authentication method, such as Oracle wallets or secure external password store for configuring a persistent channel because RMAN does not allow passwords in the connection string of the CONFIGURE CHANNEL command.

If you suddenly see Oracle RMAN backups failing with a RMAN-10042 error, this may be down to a database upgrade.

RMAN-10042: retry CONFIGURE CHANNEL command without password in CONNECT string

Fortunately the error code is very explicit and the fix is easy, e.g. you need to remove the password from the CONNECT string.

In one of my development lab environments I was using the CONFIGURE DEVICE PARALLELISM and CONFIGURE CHANNEL CONNECT to set-up 64 load balanced RMAN channels across my Oracle 19c RAC cluster, avoiding the need to configure individual channels, for example:

CONFIGURE DEVICE TYPE DISK PARALLELISM 64 BACKUP TYPE TO COPY;  # image copy
CONFIGURE CHANNEL DEVICE TYPE DISK MAXOPENFILES 1 FORMAT '/mnt/fbs500/%d/%U' CONNECT 'sys/<password>//z-rac-scan/DEMOCDB';

Note, the 19.33 behaviour change is limited to CONFIGURE CHANNEL and does not impact ALLOCATE CHANNEL.

If required, and acceptable from a security viewpoint, you can continue to use ALLOCATE CHANNEL with a connection string, for at least for now, but suggest it’s time to explore more secure approaches.

For example:

 ALLOCATE CHANNEL CH1 DEVICE TYPE DISK MAXOPENFILES 1 FORMAT '/mnt/fbs500/%d/%U' CONNECT 'sys/<passord>@//z-rac1/democdb as sysdba';
 ALLOCATE CHANNEL CH2 DEVICE TYPE DISK MAXOPENFILES 1 FORMAT '/mnt/fbs500/%d/%U' CONNECT 'sys/<password>@//z-rac2/democdb as sysdba';

You can check-out all the Oracle 19.33 goodness by following the link to the New Features and Behavior Changes in 19c Release Updates, Release Update 19.33 release documentation.

Note to Self: before upgrading to any new release remember to read the release notes to avoid unexpected surprises.