techblog 

As mentioned previously we run our database on an Oracle RAC cluster. Recently an instance of our physical standby had a problem meaning we had to change which node of our standby cluster the managed recovery process ran on. However one node of our primary was showing the following:

SQL> SELECT DEST_ID “ID”,  STATUS “DB_status”,     

   DESTINATION “Archive_dest”, ERROR “Error” 

   FROM V$ARCHIVE_DEST 

   WHERE DEST_ID < 3; 

         1 VALID     /path/to/arhived_redo/SID/ 

         2 VALID     CROSS_INSTANCE 

         3 DISABLED  STANDBY        
                       

 ORA-16011: Archivelog Remote File Server process in Error state 

Now the odd thing was that there was no connectivity issue between this node of the primary and the surviving node of the standby - I could use sqlplus to connect to the standby instance from this primary node. The 2nd node of our primary was showing dest 3 as being valid, so basically somehow this node had got confused or rather an RFS process on the standby had got confused. However I attempted to restart the standby instance but this did not clear up the ORA-16011 error. While this error was remaining the standby was showing an ever increasing transport lag so was obviously not receiving any redo from this node of the primary. To fix it up I had to do the following:

SQL> alter system set log_archive_dest_3=” scope=memory;

What you then do is to recreate your log_archive_dest exactly as you had it before. This seemed to clear everything up quite nicely and we now have our standby back up-to-date. There is not much info out there about ORA-16011, though I notice this snippet from the Oracle online documentation mentions fixing the standby but I don’t think this is correct.