ORA-32028: Syslog facility or level not recognized

Recently I had the opportunity to update the audit settings on an Oracle database. It seemed fairly straight forward: alter the system parameters then recycle the database. Easy!!

Upon issuing the startup command the below error was displayed. 

 ORA-32028: Syslog facility or level not recognized

The issue was because I didn't use single quotes in the alter system command

alter system set audit_trail=NONE

Instead of:

alter system set audit_trail=’NONE’

To fix this issue the value in the database parameter file needed to be amended.

With the database offline, create a copy of the pfile.

create pfile='/tmp/initDB1.ora' from spfile;

Then edit the value.

Edit the pfile

vi /tmp/initDB1.ora

......

*.audit_sys_operations=FALSE

*.audit_syslog_level=' '

*.audit_trail='NONE'

.....

After changing the parameter, start the database using the amended pfile.

sqlplus / as sysdba

startup pfile = /tmp/initDB1.ora

Then create an spfile from the good pfile.

create spfile from pfile='/tmp/initDB1.ora';

This saves an spfile to $ORACLE_HOME/dbs which has the parameters that are in the pfile.

ls -lrt $ORACLE_HOME/DBS

rw-r-----    1 oracle   dba            3584 11 Nov 12:33 spfileDB1.ora

Finally restart the database to check that it now starts successfully when it uses the spfile.

shutdown immediate

startup