RMAN with Netbackup - ALL Tape backups expired

Question

Hello,
I am currently experiencing some issues between Netbackup and RMAN.
A bounce of the Netbackup server seems to have marked all our tape backups managed by RMAN as 'Expired'. This means RMAN can no longer locate any of the tape backups.
We have checked the rentention periods and the physical backups on the tapes and they seem to be ok. Therefore it would suggest a link problem between Netbackup and RMAN. We have tried bouncing the Netbackup servers again but this has not resolved the situation.
However sometimes the tape backups become available and but then become expired again.
I have also tried backing up to Tape since the bounce and the backup is successful, however 24 hours later it becomes expired despite Retention policy set to 4 weeks on both RMAN and Netbackup.
Please help!
Thank you

Answer 1

Hey;
I tried the delete obsolete; command initially. Admittedly, I didn't report that - so here's the output:
RMAN> delete obsolete;
using target database control file instead of recovery catalog
RMAN retention policy will be applied to the command
RMAN retention policy is set to recovery window of 3 days
allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1
channel ORA_DISK_1: sid=137 devtype=DISK
allocated channel: ORA_DISK_2
channel ORA_DISK_2: sid=132 devtype=DISK
Deleting the following obsolete backups and copies:
Type Key Completion Time Filename/Handle
Backup Set 6 10-SEP-09
Backup Piece 6 10-SEP-09 c-1369681761-20090910-00
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of delete command at 07/24/2010 21:36:58
RMAN-06091: no channel allocated for maintenance (of an appropriate type)
As for the changing default device type: someone had mentioned that the default device type was disk so I changed it to tape, tried the command, failed, then switched it back.
Just to reiterate: I don't have a tape drive on this box; never did. I'm not sure how two tape backups could have gotten there in the first place.
The oracle version is:
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options
and the OS version is:
$ uname -r; cat /etc/redhat-release
2.6.18-128.el5xen
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.3 (Tikanga)
If push comes to shove, I can leave those two backups. There were a rather large number of them that I did successfully make go away. It just seems odd that I can't make these guys go away.
Thanks for the help; I appreciate it.
Doug