Bugs
In addition to the permissions on these files, there also happen to be bugs in the Scheduler. If you ever plan to use chains, apply the patch for bug 5705385
. It should be fixed in 11.1.0.7 and 10.2.0.5, and is available as one-off patch for 10.2.0.3 and 10.2.0.4. This bug causes the situation in which a running chain exists without a running job. If you don't have this patch and you start a job that is running a chain, it ends successfully. The next run terminates upon startup. The third start will have the chain running again and the fourth run will again terminate upon startup.
By definition, no running chain can exist when there is no running job that runs the chain. Without this fix, the situation is a little different; a chain can exist in *_SCHEDULER_RUNNING_CHAINS
without a job in *_SCHEDULER_RUNNING_JOBS
.
Starting the job again cleans this situation up. In case you cannot apply this patch, it is possible to use the job event queue to trigger the detection of this situation...