It is a SBT driver for ORACLE® RMAN allowing to backup and restore database from any SSH server. The transfer protocol is highly secure using SFTP over SSH2. Thus, you can backup the database anywhere, without the need for local storage, or share, or expensive third-party software.

The driver implements the SBT API V2 and acts as a SFTP client to list or transfer the backup set. It supports multiple channels, and the transfer rate is not limited. Authentication with the remote server uses only SSH key exchange (KEX). You can use the default key pair (id_rsa) of the oracle user, or a dedicated pair. The remote server only needs to know the public key and it is not allowed to connect to the database server.

The driver is statically linked with LIBSSH2, and dependencies are limited to OpenSSL which is provided with the OS distribution. You don't need any agent or third-part software. All requirements are in your database server box.

All interfaces are based on reverse engineering of RMAN SBT. Since the SBT API isn't public, you have no way to obtain it by free, so you use this at your own risk.

Remote user must append its file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys with the public key of the local oracle user i.e ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. Using the default $HOME/.ssh/ keys requires that the HOME environment variable be set correctly. Otherwise you must specify the paths with OB_PUBLIC_KEY and OB_SECRET_KEY.

RUN {
ALLOCATE CHANNEL S1 DEVICE TYPE sbt
PARMS='SBT_LIBRARY=/usr/local/lib/libobksftp.so,ENV=(
OB_SERVER=<remote host>,
OB_USER=<remote user>)';

BACKUP CURRENT CONTROLFILE FORMAT 'rman/%d/%U';
RESTORE CONTROLFILE VALIDATE;
}

The sample below, set an absolute path for prefix the format.

CONFIGURE CHANNEL DEVICE TYPE sbt FORMAT '%d/%U'
PARMS='SBT_LIBRARY=/usr/local/lib/libobksftp.so,ENV=(
OB_SERVER=<remote host>,OB_USER=<remote user>,OB_PATH=/backup)';

CONFIGURE CONTROLFILE AUTOBACKUP FORMAT FOR DEVICE TYPE sbt TO '%d/%F';

CONFIGURE DEFAULT DEVICE TYPE TO 'SBT_TAPE';

OB_SERVER     : REQUIRED, remote server name or IP
OB_USER       : REQUIRED, remote user owns of the backup pieces
OB_PATH       : optional, prefix path of the storage    (default: remote user home)
OB_PUBLIC_KEY : optional, public key file path to use   (default: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)
OB_SECRET_KEY : optional, private key file path to use  (default: ~/.ssh/id_rsa)
OB_PORT       : optional, remote server port            (default: 22)
OB_LOGFILE    : optional, file path for debug logging   (default: none)

Obviously, you can easily list the sbt backup pieces on a remote server, using the ssh command. that might help to populate the catalog by generating a script as follows.

for bkp in $(ssh ${OB_USER}@${OB_SERVER} "ls ${OB_PATH}"); do
  echo "CATALOG DEVICE TYPE 'SBT_TAPE' BACKUPPIECE '$bkp';"
done