A quick update. Oracle support called me and asked me to try setting the environment to the auxiliary instance instead of target. And voila, the error is gone! rman target sys/xxxx@mytarget catalog rman@mycatalog auxiliary / I'll work on it tomorrow morning because I still have disk space issue. Will make an NFS mount to somewhere (with event 10298 level 32). Yong Huang -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l