[Discuss] Shutting down Oracle hosted on Linux

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey (blu))]

> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
> bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of Jerry Feldman
> 
> Since the Linux shutdown command
> issues a kill -TERM on all processes is it really necessary to do the
> Oracle shutdown prior to the Linux shutdown.

In the old days, the shutdown command just ran the shutdown scripts.  Problem was, if something didn't die during the shutdown scripts, then the shutdown would fail, and you'd have to power cycle.  So later, they modified the process.  Shutdown runs the shutdown scripts, and just in case something won't die, they issue a final killall -KILL, and do some more forceful things, to ensure the system will go down.

If your shutdown command is killing oracle ungracefully, it means you have a bad shutdown script.  Fix it.

Perhaps in your shutdown scripts, you're unmounting a filesystem or terminating some other service that oracle requires, before stopping oracle?  Perhaps you're missing, or have a mangled, shutdown script?  Perhaps the oracle process takes time to die gracefully, and your script exits too quickly?  Maybe you need to put a (non-infinite) loop inside your shutdown script, to monitor for the oracle process actually dying, before exiting the shutdown script?

I would suggest this:  (Forgive the simplicity, if this is "beneath" you)

runlevel
	(see what runlevel you're in)
ls -l /etc/rc3.d/K* | grep oracle
	substitute present runlevel for "3"
	substitute the oracle service name for "oracle"
	Figure out what happens if you run as root:
	/etc/rc3.d/K49oracle stop

As long as the stop script gracefully stops the oracle process, you should be all set.