Dear List, I have been an Oracle DBA\Developer solely on Unix platforms and have now inherited the task of administering a new Oracle 10g instance on a Windows 2k server. We are using backup exec to do weekly cold backups and wanted to know how to remotely stop and start the database from the backup server. I have attempted using sc and net start/stop to remotely stop the services without success. With sc I get C:\>d:\sc \\oratest stop oracleservicedw [SC] ControlService FAILED, rc = 1051 I cannot find a definition of what rc=1051 means. I have also tried to Google the answer to no avail. I am recommending that we switch to hot backups using rman and Netbackup for the future but that is several approvals away. The other option I have considered is installing the oracle client on the backup server and writing a standard startup and shutdown script, however I am not inclined to do so as I would need to have the password in a plain text file on the backup server. Thanks in advance, Ken -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l