Solution:

The message 'Failed to archive' can be ignored, as long as it is followed by a 'Completed archiving' message.

Workaround:

Do not issue the command 'Alter system archive log current'.

Explanation:

The command 'Alter system archive log current' he is forces manual archiving of the current log, hence the shadow process on which the command was issued will perform the archiving. It will archive the logfile and write messages to the trace/alert using the prefix ARCH.

If automatic archiving is turned on then the archiver process will also try to archive this logfile, however will not be able to aquire the lock 'kcrrlt' ie the lock to protect multiple arch processes from archiving the same logfile.

The failing process process will write to the trace/alert message that it was unable to archive the logfile.

If you set the event log_archive_trace = 127 in the init.ora file
then you can trace the archiving steps for both the shadow as well as the archiver process

This command 'Alter system archive log current' is commonly used in hot-backup scenarios.

You can even see this "error" when you don't issue the 'alter system..' command. Because Oracle 8i, by default, gives a finer grain of error messages.