Oracle Database Discussions

Hi Guys,
I am running into the following issue while restoring a database. I searched on the internet for the error code and got various hits all indicating a different cause. Some suggested relinking the oracle binaries, I tried that as well but did not work. While other links suggested that it is a persmission issue on the oracle binary which is also not the case. I read the oracle documentation on the error and it says that the "partner" application has gone away. What is a "partner" application?

I am performing disaster recovery in the cloud. The system where it fails is in the cloud and has no database but only the oracle software installed. I have scripts that will then take a backup from primary site and resotre it on this system. This has been working for me in the past. There has been a few changes in our approach and I am trying to eliminate those changes to get it back to the point where those changes don't matter. At this point what I am looking for is some kind of logical explanation to the problem as the error message does not make any sense to me.

Output of permission on the oracle binary
--
-rwsr-s--x 1 dev users 199650985 Dec 21 17:29 /oracle/app/dev/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1/bin/oracle
--


Output of rman
--
[dev@oraclese1-demo ~]$ rman target /

Recovery Manager: Release 11.2.0.1.0 - Production on Thu Dec 22 13:11:29 2011

Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00554: initialization of internal recovery manager package failed
RMAN-04005: error from target database:
ORA-12547: TNS:lost contact
---