Standby Installation

Question

Hello Helpful Souls,
I need help with Oracle Standby installation and recovery. I am Not a DBA ofcourse. This is the existing setup.
1. 2 Machines "Beta" and "Standby" with 2 Oracle 8.1.6 Enterprise complete installation less Management Server. Both are Windows NT 4.0 ServicePack 6a machines
2. Have only 1 schema with max DB size as of now 1GB. Can grow but not rapidly.
3. Using DBA Studio for high level maintenance (like creating TABLESPACE, TABLES, VIEWS,etc..)
4. "Beta" is in "archiving mode"
5. "Standby" is in Standby mode. Did that using following sequence.
     5a. Created stby control file in Beta using ALTER DATABASE CREATE STANDBY CONTROLFILE AS 'c:\stbycf.f';
     5b. Copied all the "Beta" files to "Standby" (.dbf,.ora,.log). Also copied the control file.
     5c. Changed init.ora in "Standby" commenting the original control_files and making the copied control file as control_files="d:\oracle\oradata\instance\stbycf.f"
     5d. Database is then started and mounted only without opening. "Alter database mount Standby database"
Initial Testing
1. Copied all the archive files from "Beta" to "Standby" (sometimes forced the archiving by "alter system switch logfile").
2. Issued the command "recover automatic standby database" on the "Standby" machine and found that all the archive files copied are archived properly.
3. I checked the thread#, sequence# from V$log_history and they both the machines are same. Also the data is correct when I open standby in readonly mode after which i switch back to standby mode again.
Help Needed
Please help me how to do this in an automatic manner. Just need a Standby machine.
When i tried to archive (second destination) of "Beta" instance to "Standby" machine using Net8 connection, it crashed my "Beta" when network between "Beta" and "Standby" is disrupted/broken.
Is this always the approach ? I have no clue what are the approaches or How to do it. Please advice
Thanks
Bharani Kannan

Answer 1

Be sure that you specify a reopen time in your archive log parameter ie:
log_archive_dest_2="SERVICE=STANDBY.WORLD MANDATORY REOPEN=60
Failure to do so will hang the instance after it runs out of redo logs.
For additional 'insurance' you could also increase the number or size of your redo logs.