A note about Startup/Shutdown scripts – dbora

Per the last post in this thread, I have created a startup script to an Oracle setup I’ve had.

The script is rather simple – you “su –” to the Oracle user, and you just start the DB. Same goes for shutting it down. I have tested it and it worked well.

Due to the customer’s demands, we’ve relocated the DB data to an NFS on NetApp. Afterwards, reboots didn’t go quite will. It seemed that the DB never went down correctly, and that we’ve managed, somehow, to umount the NFS volumes without shutting it down.

After a short investigation, it was revealed that /etc/rc.d/rc, which controls the startup and shutdown of services on a system, checks to verify that there is a lock file with the same name as the startup service. In our case – we should have created an empty file in /var/lock/subsys/ named dbora during the startup of our dbora script.

When changing the script to do it (and to remove the file during shutdown), things started working correcly.